Creative Labs licensing ass-hattery
Kim Pallister says
Brad Fortner, Ryerson University's technology director, has a couple excellent blog posts about a recent debacle in which Creative Labs has issued a cease-and-desist to a 'Daniel_K', an enthusiastic customer who has written and released drivers for Creative Labs, fixing features that were broken in their own drivers, and also supporting operating systems they didn't have drivers for. Clearly, improving Creative Labs products is something best left NOT DONE.
The blogosphere has responded to Creative's VP of Communications by 'crowdripping' him a new one! Post 1 | Post 2
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While I agree that Creative Labs are being really stupid here, there seems to be some confusion over what Daniel K actually did. Creative seem to be saying that he took drivers that provided some features and modified those drivers to work on cards that never provided those features. I'd guess that's vaguely analagous to taking a DVD-Writer with a bundled copy of Nero along with its drivers, and making Nero work with another DVD-Writer that was not bundled with Nero. Whoever made the DVD-Writer would legitimately complain that they hadn't licensed Nero for that DVD-Writer, and so copying it is theft, and condoning it could get them into trouble with whoever makes Nero.
Is that in fact what he did? Would everyone have been happy if he'd simply modified the drivers to work with Vista, but to provide no features that the cards did not originally have? (Or at least, if he did provide any new features, he would have to have written them himself and not just copied them from the other drivers.)
From what I understand, he enabled features that were already present on the card, but unsupported under Vista. For example, you could listen to Dolby Surround in XP, but not in Vista. Creative had told their customers that enabling those features under Vista wasn't possible (for whatever reason). So when Daniel said "You totally can! Look, see?" Creative's response was "STOP STEALING OUR FEATURES >:( " which was such a ridiculous claim, their user base went into rebellion.
There was also some iffiness about the method by which he enabled the features, which involved replacing part of the public driver with part of a proprietary Dell driver. But while that may seem like more of a legitimate claim, that wasn't what Creative was raising a stink over.
For those who want their corporatese unfangled here's a copy of what was sent to Daniel_K. I can find only hearsay evidence with regards to the Dell thing, but it sounds like CLs issue was his modding of their existing drivers. They didn't seem to be working the alien-IP angle at all, just that he was patching their existing code without authorization.
I assume that "crowdripping" is meant to be parsed as "crowd-ripping", but first read I thought you were saying "crow-dripping" and I had no idea what you meant. I figured it out, but it can be sort of tough to get the reading part of my brain to retokenize a word. I think that it's sometimes good to keep in mind that English is not an agglutinating language.
#4:
Same here. I read it as "crow dripping" and thought, "Crap. I just figured out 'rickrolled' and now there's this."
#5:
I had EXACTLY the same response!
Back to the story, it would be one thing if he were selling these drivers. He wasn't. He just hacked them together. Creative still makes money off the hardware (they're a hardware company!). I am often on the fence with IP things, but this seems perfectly okay with me.
That's ok, I read it as "cow-dripping". I had all kinds of images in my head.
Cawwwww!
I could be wrong but from what I understand manufacturers of sound cards and graphics cards are deliberately crippling some features that are present in the hardware and then selling the same card as a lesser model. So the $50 card is exactly the same as the $100 one but with some features disabled.
I don't know if that is the case here but Daniel K may have re-enabled features that Creative disabled on purpose and they see him as stealing the $50 they would have made on selling the same card to the consumer as the next model up.
This should be fun to watch. I've got the popcorn...
When you have a room full of lawyers on a chain they will find work. They think of it as a service to the corporation but a huge media blow up and tons of bad press and letters from customers will convince them otherwise. Why can't Creative be happy selling hardware? We have to smash the MS software method and teach the other players that abusing contract law or copyright is not acceptable. Keep up the angry cards and letters.
This story hit the tech sites the other week, and since then, Creative realized Daniel_K was doing a better job than they were, apologized, and restored the links to his work:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/04/04/creative_restores_home_brew_vista_driver_links/
They are still morons, simply for their continuing policy of not supporting newer features on perfectly capable hardware because they released a slightly different model. They are far from the only company to do this, it seems to be a big thing among peripheral makers. MS and Logitech do the same with the features of their keyboards and mice. They all use the same drivers, but you might not be able to map the buttons on one model of mouse to do something you can make a different model do. Thankfully there's UberOptions. (and Logitech is smart enough not to take action against the project)
Electricinca - wow, you assume the price difference between 'consumer' and 'pro' is only $50? You can turn a GeForce or Radeon gaming card into a Quadro/FireGL workstation card... check out the price differences involved there!