> If you fail to comply with our demands by the specified deadline, Synaptics will seek monetary
compensation from you in the amount of US$25,000 to recoup the costs and effort required to
create the attached documentation of your infringing acts.
Obviously this is intended as a scare tactic, but, surely that could never hold up in court? Surely the burden of proof is on the owner of the patents to prove that someone's work is infringing, and you can't then say "We are charging the defendant to prove that we have a valid case against them." ?
They can attempt to sue for whatever they want. The court may or may not accept the case. Seeking the recovery of costs for enforcement of ones patents if the defendant does not stop infringing is not under heard of, though it is typically attached to a case seeking the courts ruling that the defendant must stop infringing.
It's not uncommon to seek legal costs in a lawsuit. They are usually judged and awarded seperately to the main claim, so it's not always loser pays. It can of course be weaponised to make the potential price of losing larger, though. A claim with unreasonably large costs is less likely to actually be granted, but often the lawyers are aiming to not get that far.
OK but it's surely not reasonable for the claim to consist entirely of legal costs? You could have avoided all of those costs by just not making the claim.
In some countries, but not in America, this is normal - you could win $1 and still whatever your lawyers cost would be added on, to incentivize the defendant to have voluntarily paid the $1 instead of forcing a court to force them to pay the $1.
It works both ways of course, if you lose a suit then you have to repay the defendant for their lawyers.
That is not true at all. There is an extremely well established principle in English common law jurisdictions, including Australia that “the successful party is generally entitled to his or her costs by way of indemnity against the expense of litigation that should not, in justice, have been visited upon that party.”[1]
[1] Northern Territory v Sangare [2019] HCA 25; 265 CLR 164 at [25]
It would sure be a shame if we all vibe coded thousands of clean-room implementations, put them all on github, and then asked Synaptics for patent guidance about each one.
I'd be willing to throw in on this, at certain point it becomes about the principle of the thing, and at least for me, I've been feeling those principles yelling pretty loudly in my metaphorical ear lately.
There's no way that a thinking human at Synaptic thought this was a good idea. Why would you threaten your own customers for having the gall to try to improve support for your product for free? So I can only assume that they spent $25000 on tokens to generate these threats.
> "single-handedly eviscerating DisplayLink's competitive advantage in this crowded market by educating our competitors and other third parties as to how we implement our proprietary technology"
You’re assuming the patent is the only thing in the code. Theres likely also trade secrets, as many pieces of secret sauce are not patentable. No one files patents on things they want as trade secrets after all.
Trade secret law doesn't work that way. You can use it against an employee or business partner who signed a contract with you, or a competitor who paid off your employees to give them information. But someone finding your secrets independently is fair game.
Third party reverse engineering is never illegal for this reason. You can only violate copyright by publishing decompiled code, which is not the case with this driver. They might claim breach of contract if their EULA bans reverse engineering but that only applies to the person who entered into the agreement. If someone else decides to republish it then it's out of their hands.
DisplayLink is dying due to high DDR prices. Dock companies are cancelling their display link portfolios due to the unfavorable economics.
Good riddance if this is how OSS is treated by synaptics.
Most recent thunderbolt docks and usb4 docks have good display support, and fallback to DisplayPort alt mode if the host does not support tbt4. Which is much better supported over type-c. Intel and AMD upstream host support.
On my computer around 500 MB for two additional 4K monitors but I've heard up to 1 GB. With the RAM crunch, running DL + Docker + browser (esp Chrome), it gets pretty laggy sometimes.
What percentage does one gigabyte of RAM represent across the average amount of RAM in a laptop or computer? People who run multiple screens might spend more on RAM and storage, no?
What financial damage does the Linux driver cause to Synaptics, if the hardware can only be made by them, and the driver increases the number of devices where that hardware is usable?
Also, if the concern is that he would be educating the competitors, that is what the patent is supposed to do, describe the invention. And in any case, the developer could, instead of a driver, write a book describing how SystemLink works and that would not violate any patent.
> I will also be sending to you our demand for substantial monetary compensation to recoup the cost and effort required to create such documentation of your infringing acts.
There is no universe in which this is a reasonable response.
I own two of their devices and some of the decomp fairies flittering through the gaming industry might just take a visit to their stack for some internal prodding…
Not only that, but if you were to point Astra, Argon, or Opus at their patents and tell it, "Find some prior art that will invalidate these claims", I suspect the odds of success would be better than even.
Maybe it is time to run a friendly LLM and claim to be worried citizen who is seeking relief by reversing the firmware and excluding GPL lisence violations from their nightmares.
Pretty much how SCO sued IBM. When you sue for infringement, you pretty much have to tell the infringer about the infringement and allow them a chance to rectify it. SCO wasn't interested in rectification - they hoped holding out long enough would force IBM to settle. Didn't happen. And they won nothing.
This case is definitely disingenuous. It's not yet a case. But even an open source project without money needs to be careful. Put dev on hold, hope a benefactor comes along, play it safe for a few days, weeks, months ...
Not really, all of law works that way. Everybody is allowed to demand pretty much anything from anybody for any reason, and include anything in any contract they're party of regardless of legality of any of the demands. It's the other party's responsibility to know which of these are legally valid and invalid.
Law most certainly does NOT work that way. If a business wanted to take you to court over contract violation then they’d have to tell you what you violated.
Likewise, a police officer cannot arrest you without telling you what law you broke.
Technically, Synaptics cannot sue without telling you what patents you violated either. But where patent laws get abused is businesses extorting others over threats of high legal costs.
Nobody is taking anybody to court. They're merely threatening to take to court. It's not illegal to threaten to go to court over bullshit claims, and words are cheap. That's why it keeps happening.
When I said all law, I meant there's nothing about tech patent law that makes it uniquely predisposed to this kind of extortionist behavior. All areas of economic activity have this exact same problem. Employment, debt collection, warranties, housing rentals, and many other things regularly involve pages upon pages of pointed threats written in legalese that don't have any actual laws behind them, but to people without legal experience are indistinguishsble from actual valid claims. There are entire businesses built around the fact most people can't ditinguish it. It's so deeply integrated in our lives that it's basically expected to happen every time a written contract is involved.
> It's not illegal to threaten to go to court over bullshit claims, and words are cheap.
In America it might not be. But the UK does have some protections against this kind of bullying. And this would fall under UK jurisdiction so UK laws apply
> All areas of economic activity have this exact same problem. Employment, debt collection, warranties, housing rentals, and many other things regularly involve pages upon pages of pointed threats written in legalese that don't have any actual laws behind them,
Again, in UK law this isn’t the case. For example the UK has significantly stronger employment laws than the US.
In short, not everywhere is governed by lax US laws, thankfully.
Of course, an American company can still threaten a Scottish citizen over bullshit patent claims if they wanted thought the individual didn’t have the finances to take the company to court. But that wouldn’t be lawful communication under Section 70B: Permitted communications of the Patents Act 1977. And thus not an example of your point about how all laws behave like that.
Which then comes right back to my original comparison of a protection racket. The one you originally objected to
The person you responded said nothing about involving the formal legal system. The formal legal system is only involved in about ~1% of legal disputes. ~99% of legal disputes are settled outside of the formal legal system, where yes, anyone can whip open MS Word and type up whatever the fuck they want, and the burden is on the two parties communicating to check each other.
And they're right, most law is practiced outside of a courtroom. And essentially all civil disputes start outside of them. The vast majority of professional lawyers do not litigate at all.
Id already said civil disputes start outside the court room.
What I’m saying is that not all UK law works on the basis of accusations without evidence, like the GP argued.
Take this specific example, UK civil law does say the initial communication doesn’t have to include the patent numbers. However it does go on to say that if threats are then made then that information should be disclosed
If Synaptic require multiple weeks of work at $25,000 a week, to establish what patents are infringed, while also threatening to charge the developer for that time as well as further legal action, then it’s safe to assume that Synaptic didnt have enough confidence from the outset that their original claim was reasonably true.
In short, they are opening themselves up to litigation in return. But since their legal budget is vastly greater than this solo dev’s legal budget would be, they can skirt the fridges of what would be reasonable permitted communications.
BI doubt many UK judges would take favourable view with how Synaptics have handled their correspondence; if this ever were to reach the courts.
That is fair, I think what the above point was that formal technicalities matter only in so much as someone has the means and motivations to go to trial, which is rarely.
It depends on the jurisdiction (and there are quite a few in play for HN commentards)
In some jurisdictions, the "threat" describes the maximum possible payout that could be awarded so obviously you deploy a massive sum. I believe that is a US thing.
Law has rules and most of them are written down within most jurisdictions or can be inferred via case law, constitutions, or the distribution of tea leaves (as appropriate).
That's why it called the rule of law - the thing is you need to determine the rules in play. For example you said: "a police officer cannot arrest you without telling you what law you broke."
That is mostly true in the UK, unless you fall afoul of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) which involves some pretty wide ranging powers and effects.
It is unlikely to be even vaguely true in Russia or China or any other jurisdiction that doesn't really bother with nonsensical notions such as: demos kratos.
I shouldn't bother using words like "technically".
The article mentions the jurisdiction being the UK. so I don’t think we need to expand the scope to Russia and China.
in UK law, IP infringement falls under the category of civil law. While these can be settled out of court, you absolutely couldn’t take someone to court without disclosing what property has been infringed upon.
That's not universal, and it's why certain terms are nearly never brought to court because everyone knows they will be laughed out and then they will have to change lots of EULAs for regionally illegal claims
It is standard practice to include certainly illegal clauses in contracts. There is no penalty for including illegal clauses, they don't impact the rest of the contract, and there's always the chance the other party is not going to catch it.
I didn't think reverse engineering itself was a violation of a patent? The entire point of a patent is the public disclosure of the mechanism of an invention for the exclusive right to market that invention. Therefore arguing that reverse engineering is a violation of a patent is definitionally incorrect. They should be arguing it's a violation of trade secrets. Of course, they'd lose on that argument too because clean room reverse engineering of a trade secret is fine because you definitionally don't have a patent on it! That's the patent vs trade secret tradeoff!
Yes, but they're arguing in the letter that the work is _also_ disclosing information that would allow their competitors to know how DisplayLink works. You can't have it both ways.
Yeah, that statement clearly is making IP claims beyond patent infringement, they just didn't elaborate. They didn't say it's patent infringement because of that.
1. Reverse engineering for interoperability gives you a defense for copyright and trade secret claims in the US. It provides zero protection from patent claims. "reverse engineering a patent" doesn't even make any sense. Patents are public, there's nothing to reverse engineer. You could "reverse engineer a specfiic implementation of a patent", but the only thing you'd be accomplishing is just avoiding infringing on the parts of the implementation that are subject to copyright or trade secret protections. You'd still be violating the patent.
2. I'm not saying their arguments are valid. It's a demand letter with multiple claims. There's many reasons it might be an invalid argument but listing more than one grievance and/or not explaining them in detail are not some of those reasons.
Coca isn't blanket-illegal. It's just very-heavily restricted in the States. (But not that restricted: My regular dentist is licensed to prescribe cocaine. At a federal level, it's less-restricted than the devil's lettuce is.)
Coca-Cola buys spent coca remains, after they've had the party powder components extracted from them. This product is not particularly restricted.
He used fenchol (a basil-like aroma), tea tree oil and tannins to replace coca leaf extract. Without tea tree oil, it did taste substantially different from coca-cola and more like Pepsi, and without tannins it was more like diet coke.
But lawyers are prone to using scary phrasing, even if that phrasing has no bite, and are free to write strongly-worded letters.
"I see that you've been publishing the privately-held, trade secret tomato processing technique I developed -- on the Internet! Now, tomato processors everywhere can see it! I'm really pissed! I demand that you stop doing this immediately! In fact, if you want a full enumeration of whar I really think about the terrible things you're doing, then I further demand that you pay me $25,000 for that effort!"
...it's got no bite, but it's a letter. It can be drafted and sent.
Trade secrets aren't an encumbrance if you discover them independently. Reverse engineering (for interop) is legal in the US. The only leg they have to stand on is patent infringement.
However reverse engineering, even for interop, doesn’t absolve you of EULA things you agreed to, which can include reverse engineering. And any such dispute can drag you into court for years and easily 10s of thousands of dollars, just to defend.
So, what? The patent is there to enforce that even if your competitors have full access to DisplayLink technology, they won't be allowed to implement it.
What is covered by the patent will be publicly available anyway after it expires. What is not covered, well it's not covered either due to their negligence or because it plainly is not patentable.
Where I'm at is that if these open source developers aren't selling or distributing the hardware for this drivers, then anyone that uses this driver implicitly has a license to the patents that they received with the hardware itself.
Trade secrets don't hold up because they're running off of public information either in the distributed binary drivers' behavior, or the behavior of the aforementioned hardware.
Copyright claims similarly don't hold because of the software interoperability exemptions.
All of that being said, I know I don't have the money laying around to fight those in court, and would be drained well before any of those points are adjudicated.
Is writting software "implementing," or is compiling it and releasing binaries (for free,) executing them, or just profiting from the sale, from the perspective of patent law? Isn't describing how something works first ammendment territory, even if the speech is compilable? (err, I guess this was Scotland & UK patent law, not the US, so 1st ammendment is, of course, irrelevant.)
That's not quite true. While there's no exemption for personal use, patented inventions can still be used for academic and research purposes. Even if you derive income from that.
E.g. it's a fair game to write and release a book: "How to Replicate DisplayLink" that would walk the reader through the steps in implementing it.
A program per se though is just a detailed description of the "invention" (i.e. a better version of the patent document itself). That's the entire software patent loophole; they take pure math and say "a system where a computer does the described math."
No, a program is literally, exactly, a blueprint. It is the abstract description. This can even be formally stated mathematically (i.e. programs are formal mathematical objects). Note that you can touch an office building. You can stand inside of one. You cannot touch a program. You cannot stand inside of one. There is no concrete "thing" that is the program. You can only run a program using a (universal) computing machine, which can perform any math.
Ok, call it whatever you want, all of these semantics and metaphors are legally irrelevant anyway. I still fail to see what this tangent has to do with this conversation.
Because a patent is a description of an invention. A computer program (like a driver) is also a description of some algorithm. This is not a metaphor. It is definitionally exactly true. Saying it's protected by a patent is like saying an engineering book is protected by a patent (in fact, you can print a program in... a book, and there are many programs contained in books). It's not only false, but would go against the entire purpose of a patent, which is to publish a description of the invention.
It does because patents don't cover descriptions of inventions. They cover inventions. Words in a book aren't the right "type" to be able to infringe on a patent, but they can be a computer program.
You yourself linked to a case limiting even the ability to claim that running a computer program on a computer can be patented. The program itself was never patentable.
The point is that software does not implement an invention. You're making a type error. No software does. It's like saying "a green tastes good." Green doesn't taste anything, and you can't have "a green." It's a color. When you write those words it's just a nonsense string. Software doesn't implement any patent just like 5 or pi don't implement any patent. It's a formal mathematical object. It also can't violate a patent because you can't patent mathematical objects, only inventions. An implementation of a patent may contain a computer that runs software.
It's like saying a circuit diagram could infringe on a patent. No, only a circuit can. Software is the diagram. A thing running software can infringe, but software isn't the right type of thing to be able to infringe. You can print books full of detailed diagrams and instructions all day long. The patent is already supposed to describe the thing! It's not secret! A description of every last detail is not protected!
This is also why you can prove things about software. You cannot prove things about inventions; only models of the inventions. You can actually prove statements about software itself because it is already part of formal mathematics.
Again, you are conflating "what can be patented" with "what can infringe"
If you make, use, produce, supply, induce someone to use anything that does a thing that is listed in a claim of a patent -- you have violated the patent.
The argument that "software is just abstract math and so there's no way it can infringe" is bologna... like sovcit-level bologna. Any actual articulable piece of written software is not some abstract mathematical concept, it is the configuration for a machine. Courts simply do not treat software in the way you are asserting, they treat it like a component in a system. And whether or not you built the full system or you are contributing to or inducing someone else's system, doesn't matter much, it is merely the difference between direct and indirect infringement.
If what you are asserting was true, it would be great for the software industry -- we wouldn't have to worry about patents anymore!
The Supreme Court of the US literally held that software is like a blueprint, or a detailed set of instructions. Because that's what it is:
> Abstract software code is an idea without physical embodiment, and as such, it does not match §271(f)’s categorization: “components” amenable to “combination.” Windows abstracted from a tangible copy no doubt is information—a detailed set of instructions—and thus might be compared to a blueprint (or anything else containing design information). A blueprint may contain precise instructions for the construction and combination of the components of a patented device, but it is not itself a combinable component.
Courts do actually understand that software is an abstract mathematical idea. And this is the only sane way to treat software. Otherwise you'd have e.g. Lean proofs as patentable subject matter. There is no line you can draw where you say "this is software, and that is a proof." Formal reasoning (e.g. through types) is all over real world, useful software.
For what it's worth I've never actually encountered anyone who's even mentioned patents at work in the last decade. It's not a day-to-day concern that I've seen.
Yeah, when it comes to determining the question of the country of origin for the particular way they were delivering the software -- which was what quote was about.
Courts did find MS liable for infringing on AT&T's patent for Windows installed on computers in the US. And this wasn't discussed at all in that court case; it was never challenged up to SCOTUS because it was plainly a violation.
Computers running Windows with some functionality are not the same thing as Windows. That's literally the point the court made. Windows, the software, is abstract math, and cannot on its own infringe on anything. They very clearly laid out that Windows itself is a set of instructions.
Hence they could ship the intangible software itself abroad and install it without infringing on US patent law. Merely creating the software did not infringe.
That case only ruled on §271(f). Plenty of routine FOSS activities could qualify for other violations under that statute. The most likely is probably inducement -- have a README that tells someone how to install the software on a computer? You just induced them to put together the infringing system.
In practical terms there is no point in entertaining the idea of software without any relation to a computer -- people are gonna' run software on a computer, that's what it's for.
To be clear, a patent is an exclusive right to the specific functional invention, and if that invention happens to cover the one and only way to talk to the device, then it'll be hard to make a driver. In many cases you'll be able to make one for yourself due to some funny-business around patent exhaustion.
However, there is no universe where they can hold a valid patent that would encumber a driver for a regular USB display device. What they then might try to do is invoke DMCA, due to the device having DRM responsibilities (HDCP).
If they get trusted HDCP treatment from media players on some platforms, they might fight tooth and nail to not be broken open in public as that might end up with them losing trust from content providers...
Or maybe they're just assholes with no real rhyme or reason, who knows.
> If they get trusted HDCP treatment from media players on some platforms, they might fight tooth and nail to not be broken open in public as that might end up with them losing trust from content providers...
Yeah, I suspect the whole patent claim is just a ruse to try and prevent people from looking into their likely insecure HDCP implementation.
I realize this is a legal case and not engineering logic, but man, they really seem to give away the game:
The letter continued to claim that Lothian would be "single-handedly eviscerating DisplayLink's competitive advantage in this crowded market by educating our competitors and other third parties as to how we implement our proprietary technology"
You can get around it by reverse engineering it as long as what's sold doesn't violate that patent.
Many companies have had to reverse engineer an existing patent to figure out what they can do instead.
> Design-arounds are considered to be one of the benefits of patent law. By providing monopoly rights to inventors in exchange for disclosing how to make and use their inventions, others are given both the information and incentive to invent competitive alternatives that design around the original patent. In the field of vaccines, for example, design-arounds are considered fairly easy. It is often possible to use the original patent as a guide for developing an alternative that does not infringe the original patent.
And a patent can be invalidated for the lack of enablement. I.e. for not disclosing sufficient information for an average skilled practitioner to re-implement it.
Umm... what? Implementing the things described in a patent is literally a patent violation regardless of how you go about it. Reverse engineering only gets a pass for trade secrets. As you said, a patent literally describes how to do the thing.
Years ago, when i was migrating my dell work laptop to debian, i had the same problem: we had many dell docking stations and they all used displaylink.
I was pretty quick about it: they are now useless bricks.
We live in the golden age of USB-C + DP alt mode: USB C to the monitor, and that provides power, connection, video, monitor connects to a 30 euro docking with many USB, gigabit ethernet, additional video. No shitty drivers, no USB dropping randomly crashing your dock, no giant power brick and 300-something bricks.
Depending on the screen you can also daisy chain them.
Moving to a different desk require to just plug in one cable. One. And you can do all the above with an android phone, too, if it supports desktop mode you have a functional desktop inyour pocket (well, as much as a chromebook).
I have no need for those shoddy bricks anymore, or HDMI for that matter. (if only console makers and TV would drop HDMI, that would be a dream)
DisplayLink is a "clever" software workaround to hardware limitations that shouldn't exist anymore and I hope it goes away. When I got stuck with a DisplayLink dock at work it caused no end of audio issues when connecting and disconnecting, the driver had to be restarted all the time, it was a pain
Even "modern" systems like the Apple M1 and M2 base chips had hardware limits of 1 external monitor, a massive regression from the previous Intel systems.
What do you mean? Pretty much everyone at the two places I work at connect 2 monitors to their laptops. Who works using their laptop screen when at their desk?!
Where I work I had to sort of convince everyone that dual 27 inch screens is a really great setup. I think most white collar workers with a laptop get used to the laptop keyboard and trackpad and think its weird to dock it and use a regular keyboard and mouse. That is... until they try it.
I have tons of workspaces/predefined tiled layouts and a keyboard driven workflow for window management but I find it takes more of a mental toll when unrelated workspaces are "hidden" togegher.
E.g. I have a workspace for chat/communication apps because, for me at least, it's mentally easier to work with "messages are physically to my left" than "messages are workspace 3 and I get that by changing how my main view is" for some reason.
Also it's occasionally nice to be able to look at a short reference and type into another window without having to rearrange the layout itself.
But I do think people, even with multiple monitors, heavily underutilize workspaces and window management in general. Probably partly because Windows/macOS make it kind if awful by default and it takes intent and time to go learn something else. Hell, I've even seen IT veterans who hunt and pecked the keyboard straight to retirement!
You cant convince people of this. Single monitor is the only way to go. I cant alt tab (or what ever window shortcut I want) faster than I can turn my head.
Maybe I've had unusual experiences, but every office I've been to has a little laptop stand to put your macbook next to the external display. Unless for some reason you need 3 screens, one external is perfectly fine.
It has worked for me pretty great on linux for years.
The problem it solves is that if you have 3 screens (you can often get 3 gpu ouptus) then you are already OCD enough so you will need 4th screen to even them out.
I used the adapters on Mac (over 12 years ago) and Linux (last 10 years before new machine last year) to support 2 external monitors.
They work well enough (I never pushed them hard but for office work). I remember on Linux having to recompile or update this or that when a software update broke them. It was sort of supported at the time.
I think most usb to hdmi devices were display link chip sets..
I was looking into that myself a few months ago with a selfmade driver, because I own a DisplayLink USB monitor from 2015 and I wanted to run it from an old raspberry pi 1.
My personal opinion is to toss all DisplayLink products. It's e-waste to me. Plus having the CPU calculate encrypted video signals is absurd and slow.
Every DisplayLink hub or dock or adapter I've tried using has been a terrible nightmare. I've tried on Linux, macOS, and Windows. Now I actively avoid them.
I've had terrible experiences with most of the big computer name brands making Displaylink hubs. Frequent driver issues, unexplainable compatibility issues, hardware failures, and more.
My only "wow this thing just works everywhere" was actually the Plugable brand docs. Obviously can't do things like 3D gaming, but for regular desktop kind of applications dang have these things been largely bulletproof. Especially the older USB 3.0 ones.
I still remember running five displays (including the built-in) off a single cheap HP Split X2 back in the day thanks to a Plugable dock.
They were slow with Linux support but had forums that were kind of helpful in the past. Where everyone went when the Ubuntu upgrade make the devices stop working and you had to rebuild.
They seemed to had some kernel stuff that was open source for Linux.
They seemed to encourage community driver for non-Ubuntu Linux’s.
“ There is a community driven GitHub project at DisplayLink RPM which is generating RPM package for Fedora, CentOS Stream, Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux OS. It uses our code as the basis to create the RPM packages.”
For many years now, I've treated DisplayLink as a compatibility problem. My docks are exclusively pure Thunderbolt, with no DisplayLink component. Obviously this chews up more bandwidth and entails hardware commitments, but the compatibility is dramatically better.
There may be situations where you need it, especially when you have bandwidth constraints or have to use a basic USB dock. But overall, I cannot recommend enough simply treating DisplayLink as anathema. (That's true on macOS and Windows as well as Linux.) It's a second-rate solution that we should consider obsolete on decent hardware as soon as possible.
A hardware company going after someone effectively doing free work for them that might drive more sales is a stupid move, unless possibly there are some software-locked features they don't want others to know.
Of course they might be able to stop one nonymous person but they can't stop everyone else from doing so, especially anonymously and with LLMs[1], or located in a country they can't reach. Triggering a Streisand Effect is easier than ever.
[1] People in the retrocomputing community are even vibe-porting/vibe-coding drivers for newer hardware on older OSes and vice-versa.
Why actually, given that even smartphones can drive Displayport alt mode over USB-C, and tablets can speak full Thunderbolt/USB 4? Is it cheaper to implement in dock and/or laptop hardware?
You can use DisplayLink on Android (just attach a random* DisplayLink dock via USB-OTG), install the DisplayLink app and you get your Android screen in big. Combine that with Termux and Termux-X11 (on some phones you even get 3d acceleration) and you can get a surprisingly decent* desktop. (Many non-flagship Android phones don't have native video output. IMO it actually adds to the cost to have models that support video output and models that don't, but the market segmentation probably makes it worth it from the manufacturer's perspective.)
* I use a random (USB3) HP one
** There may be some lag/tearing, so maybe not so good for movies
I had an old Plugable USB 2.0 adapter laying around. I attached it to my 2025 vintage Moto phone, installed the "DisplayLink Presenter" APK and, I'll be damned-- I'm displaying my phone on a monitor.
Using a USB OTG hub, this adapter, a keyboard, and a mouse could actually make a reasonable desktop machine for RDP'ing and SSH'ing to other machines.
I haven't tried playing video but I suspect it would suuuuuuck over this USB 2.0 adapter. For text-based stuff, though, it seems completely reasonable.
I setup a DisplayLink for a friend about a year ago because most GPUs still have a 4 display limit, even with DisplayPort MST. Easier than a 2nd GPU when it works.
Is DisplayLink a company owned by Synaptics or just a file in a portfolio? How do they make money from DisplayLink except from selling the docks? Licensing?
Per the article, even if they weren't trying to play semantic games about subsidiaries (which OIN really shouldn't allow), OIN excludes "codec" patents and considers the DisplayLink patents to be "codec" patents.
Reverse engineering is mostly to address trade secret and copyright infringement.
Patents can be avoided if you can prove that a patent is "obvious to a practitioner in the field" but that's a highish bar to prove in court and requires expensive lawyers
Nevertheless Synaptics are behaving as arse here and as a purely practical matter should be welcoming people who will bring them more customers for free
A patent is a description of how something is solved, such that someone with expertise can recreate it. That patent then grants a monopoly on that method for a period of 20 years in the US, if you keep paying renewal fees.
The whole reverse engineering clean room thing, is to show no copyright infringement and / or trade secret (primarily trade secret). How could they intentionally copy the code, if they cannot see the code.
Patents are far stronger in that sense, but they do have an expiration date. People independently come up with techniques and infringe patents all the time. Look up the patent litigation history of CRISPR which are still going strong it …
It’s also disturbing they have the gall to demand tens of thousands of dollars for the task of specifying which of their 100+ maybe relevant patents he’s infringing.
Synaptics claims the driver work undermines their competitive advantage of proprietary connectivity methods, which means undisclosed, while patents trade disclosure for a monopoly
If someone happens to figure out how the undisclosed proprietary side works without exfiltrating trade secrets then there is no legal remedy, tough luck. Compete with customer support if you can
Pick a lane, Synaptics failed to pick a lane here suggesting there is some legal interoperability work outside of its patent claims, that abridges its non-patented trade secret claims, and I think that undermines their patent protection claim
When a company does something like this, do the right thing and choose not to buy their products or do business with them.
If you use any of their older products, it may be time to migrate away to more modern solutions, ideally ones made by companies that don't send legal threats to open source developers.
I finally upgraded all my gear to USB3.1Gen2+ so I no longer need to use DisplayLink. It's so nice. No more messing around with weird broken drivers. I just plug things in and they work.
No more messing with weird broken drivers but now there's often messing around with weird (and sometimes broken) cables. Some of us have boxes full of USB-C cables that we have no idea what they do.
Threw all mine out, replaced them with USB4 + 240W PD. Standard for USB4 requires minimum 20Gbps speed, protocol tunneling, backwards compatibility. The 240W PD is not standard, but you can find USB4 cables with it, and that guarantees all the previous PD standards. So it's a universal cable. Bought a couple chargers too, from 60W-140W, and a desktop multi-port charger that does combined 400W+. My USB4 dock gets power from that and plugs into whatever laptop.
> The letter is dated "October 5, 2026". WTF are these lawyers smoking that they think 5 days is any reasonable time frame.
They just try to keep the pressure up so that the other entity gives up before they have time to estimate whether any of the claims are valid. One person against big corporation, which is threatening with big penalties. A common tactic.
> The letter continued to claim that Lothian would be "single-handedly eviscerating DisplayLink's competitive advantage in this crowded market by educating our competitors and other third parties as to how we implement our proprietary technology"
If one guy can reverse-engineer everything with an LLM and some free time, I'm pretty sure their competitors can as well, and they won't be doing it out in the open like this guy was...
this is a good point. Isn't one of the pre-conditions for a patent (in the US at least, this case was UK) that it be "non-obvious" ? If LLMs can shit out working solutions that infringe patents, or "trivially" reverse engineer protocols, I wonder if we will see challenges in court that it was "obvious" to ask the LLM, and therefore the patents were trivial and therefore should be invalidated?
It's a fascinating question isn't it. I personally think the answer is pretty clearly yes for an increasingly wider array of inventions.
What fascinates me is the evidentiary question. How can courts satisfy themselves that (to adopt the EPO problem-solution approach) faced with a given problem, the mere prompting of an LLM was sufficient to arrive at a solution. Will we have consultants with zoos of LLMs providing evidence of their capability at a patent's priority date? Will patent offices need to provide examiners with access to the wayback machine for AI models? How can you, as the applicant, possibly argue with that? What degree of fiddling with the prompt to elicit a solution is fair?
That seems to be a separate claim unrelated to their patent claims. Patents themselves are required to have all of the information that would allow someone to implement what is in the patent. Of course, there could be many ways to implement it. And a specific implementation could be further protected by trade secrets. The part that would be a trade secret is inherently not in the patent.
You have to wonder if this part was approved by a qualified lawyer at all. A trade secret would describe proprietary knowledge of how to implement the technology, but would have no protection under patent law.
They also repeatedly claimed "DisplayLink is not a member of OIN" when it actually is, and later when they acquiesced to the cease and desist, one of the actual engineers from the company tried to review the PR to ask for changes. It's not clear anyone there has any clue what's going on!
I suspect they know that, but it reads as if they were just lazily tacking that claim on for effect. This isn't a petition to a court, this is just a demand letter. Listing out a bunch of scary damages is how demand letters often work. They don't have to go into details as to the basis of their legal claims.
Yes, but this claim is not that... It sounds like they're making an argument about trade secrets, without explicitly detailing the legal justification for it.
You definitely don't need to cite the legal justification for every demand you make in a demand letter.
You don't even need to have a valid justification to make a demand in a demand letter... it is common and normal to make arbitrary demands... they are negotiations.
Trade secrets aren't protected by law. That's why they aren't disclosed. If someone lawfully reverse engineers your trade secret, its secrecy disappears without legal recourse. Decompiling a binary for RE interop purposes is legal in the US.
A $20 DP splitter works better than their docks. MST is a thing outside of apple, and their Linux drivers ran the CPU at 100% and panicked weekly. We banned them shortly after buying those splitters.
So while I'm sympathetic to the defendant, DisplayLink docks work better as paperweights than actual devices.
I've never had a pc that used displaylink, but less fortunate friends in corporate jobs describe a sinking feeling of dread when realising what their laptop has.
Bad technology that doesn't deserve to exist, it seems. This is the kind of tech where it's better to finish off the RE work and release it anonymously to harm them. Adversarial interoperability, as Cory Doctorow would put it
> The letter continued to claim that Lothian would be "single-handedly eviscerating DisplayLink's competitive advantage in this crowded market by educating our competitors and other third parties as to how we implement our proprietary technology". He said that DisplayLink is not a member of OIN, and none of its technology is licensable through OIN or any other organization.
Isn’t the whole point of a patent to make the “how” patently obvious so others may learn from it?
I'll never fail to be surprised by the wide eyed naivety of some programmers. There was no other reasonably expected outcome. If I were to take on a project to improve open source capabilities for a proprietary piece of hardware or software I wouldn't be putting my name to it, you're just asking for liability.
UK doesn't have software patents, so software cannot infringe them AFAIK.
But the best solution here is everyone avoid displaylink and synaptic stuff like its radioactive, fun side quest, a user class action now that they have formally accepted all responsibility for the dire state of the software support for their hardware.
"If you don't stop doing free work which improves the chances of purchase, among Linux users, of machines that contain our chip, you are an infringer and we are going to charge you $25K for the cost of this psychotic meltdown we are having, including all required counselling and medication."
At some point there needs to be a test of when software is related to owning hardware.
Some questions that come to mind are:
Do you actually own the hardware?
Do you stop owning the hardware, meaning you're not allowed or able to use it once the company that's sold it to you stops providing or updating hardware?
Does every piece of hardware come with a guarantee that it will work on every piece of hardware that it's attached to forever?
These are just a few of the really troubling questions when people forget that software has to run on hardware. And the closer the software is to the core operation of a piece of hardware and equipment, the more topics like right to repair or right to maintain or right to optimize come up.
I never thought that a video card replacement driver would make me think of companies that are limiting Farmers from repairing and updating their own tractors.
Seriously, use OCuLink. It costs $15 for the pcie card, $10 for a cable, and $100 for a GFX card dock, and a PSU.
OCuLink doesn't even use drivers. It's literally just a PCIE passthrough. All usual tools apply, whereas DisplayLink encrypts all data, so a big fuckyou for getting logs.
Quit giving trash companies pounds of money for abuse at scale.
Displaylink is typically used in cases where your proposed solution is not possible, like multi-monitor laptop setups with hardware limitations on how many screens you can connect.
I used to connect a DL adapter to my Macbook for a third screen that was only used for chat, email and other low-bandwidth activity. It was all right, not great. Was glad to ditch it.
LWN operates a kind of soft paywall as a form of try-before-you-buy
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According to patent prosecution records, the independent claims for GB2484736 originally lacked any network transport limitations and were deemed entirely unpatentable against the prior art listed above.
To get the patent granted, DisplayLink’s attorneys amended the claims to specifically add delivery of the display data over a "general-purpose data network." The validity challenge relies on proving that adding a general-purpose transport layer (like USB or Ethernet) to existing image-compression methodologies was an obvious step and completely unoriginal in 2010, given the widespread existence of USB monitors and network-attached graphics at the time.
The patent generally covers methods and architectures for transmitting compressed screen updates over a general-purpose data network, such as USB or Ethernet, the patent specifically claims Haar-transform decoding.
So only the combination may be new. But this reminds me of a USPTO thing from my past.
The landmark ruling you are referring to is the U.S. Supreme Court case KSR International Co. v. Teleflex Inc. (2007), which led directly to the USPTO publishing its highly influential 2010 Examination Guidelines for Determining Obviousness.
Under this framework, if element A is known and element B is known, combining them is not patentable if the combination yields nothing more than predictable results.
So, general-purpose data network, such as USB or Ethernet was known (A), claims Haar-transform decoding was known (B) [DE69909880T2 / EP0955609]. Even if we don't find this combination in prior art, it is dubious that this is patent worthy based on USPTO guidelines (combine A with B).
But I see a lot of stuff that suggests prior art:
1. Noriaki Yamazaki and Tetsuo Tanaka (2007). “ZYWRLE: Enhanced VNC Codec for Motion Picture.” IEICE Transactions, J90-D(7), pp. 1790–1798.
Brief summary: Adds wavelet compression to VNC’s ZRLE codec for transmitting moving images, reducing network traffic to 20–50% of standard ZRLE.
https://search.ieice.org/bin/summary.php?abst=j&category=D&i...
2. Joshua G. Senecal, Peter Lindstrom, Mark A. Duchaineau and Kenneth I. Joy (2004). “An Improved N-Bit to N-Bit Reversible Haar-Like Transform.” Proceedings of Pacific Graphics 2004, pp. 371–380. DOI: 10.1109/PCCGA.2004.1348368.
Brief summary: Introduces PLHaar, a reversible Haar-like transform supporting lossy and lossless image compression without increasing coefficient bit width, suitable for bandwidth-limited video and graphics hardware.
https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/15014239
3. Joshua G. Senecal, Mark A. Duchaineau and Kenneth I. Joy (2004). “Reversible n-Bit to n-Bit Integer Haar-Like Transforms.” Proceedings of the Data Compression Conference 2004, p. 564.
Brief summary: Introduces lookup-table Haar-like transforms that preserve bit width and reversibility, with applications to fast image compression and streaming hardware such as DVI channels.
https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/15013668
Is this a potential use case for having a gen AI agent grind to put a prior art claim together? Feels like scanning and building prior art to challenge existing patents is a great use of AI agents, but I might be mistaken.
You assume there is some logic to software patents. It looks like an extortion racket to me. If you don’t pay enough fire insurance the mob lets your competition burn your business down.
I wouldn't pin that on patents specifically, it seems you can shut down a free software project by suing them for literally anything, even something they obviously didn't do because they can't afford a lawyer and can't afford a loss so their only option is to give in to everything you want.
If software patents are slop, you fight slop with slop.
It would take much human time to search for prior art across all of human knowledge for existing patents and new patents being proposed. But GPUs are tireless, and can continually grind towards success. They build their case for dismantling all existing active patents as long as they are kept fed.
If I were a frontier lab, I would be finding the most valuable patents, starting the research agents up, and then shorting companies that would see enterprise value decline if subject patents were invalidated (think Hindenburg or Culper Research activist investors). Just one way of monetizing the fancy search engine and token dispenser.
> I predict a high chance that they lose this patent. Mark my words.
After how many dollars spent? I mean, it is good that eventually bad patents get killed, but it still costs too much to do it, one at a time. We need a more streamlined process, maybe? Maybe an academic-review-like process at filing? Send the claims anonymously to a few experts in the field, randomly selected. If they all say it is obvious, kill it immediately and fine the company for wasting the patent office's time?
My only concern is, what if some well-meaning person puts in a poorly constructed claim, and then that creates a counterproductive precedent.
I think ideally, someone like Software Freedom Conservancy or the Linux Foundation or the FSF or whoever would take charge of doing it, taking advice from patent attorneys in the process.
Maybe there is some UK patent attorney reading this who is willing to take it on pro bono?
A bit pedantic (since my wife is in IP), but you don't need a patent attorney for most patent things, you just need a patent agent. (Who may also be an attorney.) Non-attorney patent agents can handle basically everything related to patents other than litigation.
“patent attorney” vs “patent agent” is a US distinction. In the UK, “patent attorney” is the standard term for what is called “patent agent” in the US - someone who can appear before the patent office, but cannot (in general) practice law. [0] Now, unlike US patent agents, UK patent attorneys can actually appear in court for patent litigation (they all get some limited rights to do so, and can gain additional rights by undertaking advanced training) - however, in practice, you’d use an IP solicitor/barrister for any high value patent litigation, it is mainly at the low end that UK patent attorneys handle litigation independently of a solicitor or barrister. A solicitor or barrister who specialises in patent law doesn’t have to be qualified as a patent attorney, and although it is technically possible to do so, few actually are.
[0] Technically, the UK classifies patent attorneys as legal professionals-in popular parlance, “lawyers”-but unlike solicitors and barristers, who are generalist legal professionals permitted (in principle) to practice in any legal area, a patent attorney is a specialist legal profession whose scope of legal practice is officially restricted to intellectual property (they are allowed to advise on non-patent IP law matters such as copyrights, and also related commercial law matters such as IP contracts, but not on legal matters which have no connection with IP)
Yes, it's quite jurisdiction dependant - I'm actually in Canada, not the US, and while my wife works with various foreign associates and I expect is familiar with that UK distinction, that's not a point I was clear on. :)
The most disturbing part is that a single developer, with some AI assistance, was able to improve hardware support that the manufacturer couldn't or wouldn't fix. Instead of embracing that work, Synaptics threatened to financially ruin him. As AI lowers the barrier to reverse engineering and interoperability, I suspect we'll see a lot more companies reaching for lawyers when their technical moats start disappearing.
Obviously this is intended as a scare tactic, but, surely that could never hold up in court? Surely the burden of proof is on the owner of the patents to prove that someone's work is infringing, and you can't then say "We are charging the defendant to prove that we have a valid case against them." ?
It works both ways of course, if you lose a suit then you have to repay the defendant for their lawyers.
[1] Northern Territory v Sangare [2019] HCA 25; 265 CLR 164 at [25]
[1] https://youtu.be/v5d8nwgiSYI
I want to do it in Brainfuck or Prolog or something silly.
Probably because the patent threat is just a ruse to get people to stop reverse engineering their likely insecure HDCP implementation.
> "single-handedly eviscerating DisplayLink's competitive advantage in this crowded market by educating our competitors and other third parties as to how we implement our proprietary technology"
Isn't that the purpose of a patent?
This is a clown show.
Third party reverse engineering is never illegal for this reason. You can only violate copyright by publishing decompiled code, which is not the case with this driver. They might claim breach of contract if their EULA bans reverse engineering but that only applies to the person who entered into the agreement. If someone else decides to republish it then it's out of their hands.
Good riddance if this is how OSS is treated by synaptics.
Most recent thunderbolt docks and usb4 docks have good display support, and fallback to DisplayPort alt mode if the host does not support tbt4. Which is much better supported over type-c. Intel and AMD upstream host support.
I didn't find a way to attach two "monitors" to my X screen in this way, but I guess it's doable.
Do you have an actual source for this or are you just making it up?
Also, if the concern is that he would be educating the competitors, that is what the patent is supposed to do, describe the invention. And in any case, the developer could, instead of a driver, write a book describing how SystemLink works and that would not violate any patent.
That is an abstract concept, value and goal, and it is reasonable for management to want to not suddenly loose it.
You enter a completely different problem landscape once you leave that, so you'd of course fight back.
This fighting back has cost, of course. Like this negative PR right here. But it might still be worth it.
Someone probably made the mental calculus that led us here
There is no universe in which this is a reasonable response.
DisplayLink on the driver side just compresses frames to send them over USB.
It would be interesting to analyse if Synaptics haven't stolen code from open source ffmpeg or VLC to do the compression.
See Dan Gelbart's recent video on that very subject: https://youtu.be/v5d8nwgiSYI?si=iM9AFZiRTjxu4OuZ
“You are stealing our ideas! But we won’t tell you which ones unless you pay us”
In any other domain this would be called a protection racket.
This case is definitely disingenuous. It's not yet a case. But even an open source project without money needs to be careful. Put dev on hold, hope a benefactor comes along, play it safe for a few days, weeks, months ...
Likewise, a police officer cannot arrest you without telling you what law you broke.
Technically, Synaptics cannot sue without telling you what patents you violated either. But where patent laws get abused is businesses extorting others over threats of high legal costs.
When I said all law, I meant there's nothing about tech patent law that makes it uniquely predisposed to this kind of extortionist behavior. All areas of economic activity have this exact same problem. Employment, debt collection, warranties, housing rentals, and many other things regularly involve pages upon pages of pointed threats written in legalese that don't have any actual laws behind them, but to people without legal experience are indistinguishsble from actual valid claims. There are entire businesses built around the fact most people can't ditinguish it. It's so deeply integrated in our lives that it's basically expected to happen every time a written contract is involved.
In America it might not be. But the UK does have some protections against this kind of bullying. And this would fall under UK jurisdiction so UK laws apply
> All areas of economic activity have this exact same problem. Employment, debt collection, warranties, housing rentals, and many other things regularly involve pages upon pages of pointed threats written in legalese that don't have any actual laws behind them,
Again, in UK law this isn’t the case. For example the UK has significantly stronger employment laws than the US.
In short, not everywhere is governed by lax US laws, thankfully.
Of course, an American company can still threaten a Scottish citizen over bullshit patent claims if they wanted thought the individual didn’t have the finances to take the company to court. But that wouldn’t be lawful communication under Section 70B: Permitted communications of the Patents Act 1977. And thus not an example of your point about how all laws behave like that.
Which then comes right back to my original comparison of a protection racket. The one you originally objected to
If Synaptics did want to exercise their legal right under civil law then they’d would have to disclose what properties have been infringed upon.
What I’m saying is that not all UK law works on the basis of accusations without evidence, like the GP argued.
Take this specific example, UK civil law does say the initial communication doesn’t have to include the patent numbers. However it does go on to say that if threats are then made then that information should be disclosed
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/the-patent-act-1977/section-70b-...
If Synaptic require multiple weeks of work at $25,000 a week, to establish what patents are infringed, while also threatening to charge the developer for that time as well as further legal action, then it’s safe to assume that Synaptic didnt have enough confidence from the outset that their original claim was reasonably true.
In short, they are opening themselves up to litigation in return. But since their legal budget is vastly greater than this solo dev’s legal budget would be, they can skirt the fridges of what would be reasonable permitted communications.
BI doubt many UK judges would take favourable view with how Synaptics have handled their correspondence; if this ever were to reach the courts.
A comment that the GPs you’re defending was objecting to
In some jurisdictions, the "threat" describes the maximum possible payout that could be awarded so obviously you deploy a massive sum. I believe that is a US thing.
Law has rules and most of them are written down within most jurisdictions or can be inferred via case law, constitutions, or the distribution of tea leaves (as appropriate).
That's why it called the rule of law - the thing is you need to determine the rules in play. For example you said: "a police officer cannot arrest you without telling you what law you broke."
That is mostly true in the UK, unless you fall afoul of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) which involves some pretty wide ranging powers and effects.
It is unlikely to be even vaguely true in Russia or China or any other jurisdiction that doesn't really bother with nonsensical notions such as: demos kratos.
I shouldn't bother using words like "technically".
in UK law, IP infringement falls under the category of civil law. While these can be settled out of court, you absolutely couldn’t take someone to court without disclosing what property has been infringed upon.
Also encountered many cases where a company simply didn't consider actually vetting what they put on contract against local law
the tradeoff is that it becomes free eventually, unlike trade secrets
2. I'm not saying their arguments are valid. It's a demand letter with multiple claims. There's many reasons it might be an invalid argument but listing more than one grievance and/or not explaining them in detail are not some of those reasons.
if I patent a microwave and specify exactly how it works, that part can't be trade secret
BUT if my trade secret is on using ruby diamond for deluxe premium microwave lazor THAT isn't specified on the patent, well that be a trade secret
but trade secret CAN ONLY BE PUNISHED IF someone insider leaks the info -- not much can be done if some junk collector finds out about the ruby stuff
coca-cola's coca is the coca as in cocaine (literally)
so I heard DEA has some really strict controls on that coca producing facility (so it doesn't produce cocaine)
Coca-Cola buys spent coca remains, after they've had the party powder components extracted from them. This product is not particularly restricted.
But lawyers are prone to using scary phrasing, even if that phrasing has no bite, and are free to write strongly-worded letters.
"I see that you've been publishing the privately-held, trade secret tomato processing technique I developed -- on the Internet! Now, tomato processors everywhere can see it! I'm really pissed! I demand that you stop doing this immediately! In fact, if you want a full enumeration of whar I really think about the terrible things you're doing, then I further demand that you pay me $25,000 for that effort!"
...it's got no bite, but it's a letter. It can be drafted and sent.
(It can also be ignored upon receipt.)
UNLESS the first buyer suddenly pops up and recites the EULA for them and have the agreement got right
What is covered by the patent will be publicly available anyway after it expires. What is not covered, well it's not covered either due to their negligence or because it plainly is not patentable.
Trade secrets don't hold up because they're running off of public information either in the distributed binary drivers' behavior, or the behavior of the aforementioned hardware.
Copyright claims similarly don't hold because of the software interoperability exemptions.
All of that being said, I know I don't have the money laying around to fight those in court, and would be drained well before any of those points are adjudicated.
Code is speech, but the 1st amendment has recognized exceptions for IP.
E.g. it's a fair game to write and release a book: "How to Replicate DisplayLink" that would walk the reader through the steps in implementing it.
https://gesmer.com/patent-copyright-trademark/statuatory-cha...
> it's a fair game to write and release a book: "How to Replicate DisplayLink"
And of course, patents don't protect the information that is in them -- they intentionally disclose it -- what they protect is exclusivity of use.
They are implementations.
> That's the entire software patent loophole; they take pure math and say "a system where a computer does the described math."
The "do [x] on a computer" loophole was overturned in the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Corp._v._CLS_Bank_Intern...
But what does any of this have to do with the above discussion?
Perhaps you disagree with this, but this is the current state.
You yourself linked to a case limiting even the ability to claim that running a computer program on a computer can be patented. The program itself was never patentable.
If you write software that implements an invention that is patented, you have violated the patent.
It's like saying a circuit diagram could infringe on a patent. No, only a circuit can. Software is the diagram. A thing running software can infringe, but software isn't the right type of thing to be able to infringe. You can print books full of detailed diagrams and instructions all day long. The patent is already supposed to describe the thing! It's not secret! A description of every last detail is not protected!
This is also why you can prove things about software. You cannot prove things about inventions; only models of the inventions. You can actually prove statements about software itself because it is already part of formal mathematics.
If you make, use, produce, supply, induce someone to use anything that does a thing that is listed in a claim of a patent -- you have violated the patent.
The argument that "software is just abstract math and so there's no way it can infringe" is bologna... like sovcit-level bologna. Any actual articulable piece of written software is not some abstract mathematical concept, it is the configuration for a machine. Courts simply do not treat software in the way you are asserting, they treat it like a component in a system. And whether or not you built the full system or you are contributing to or inducing someone else's system, doesn't matter much, it is merely the difference between direct and indirect infringement.
If what you are asserting was true, it would be great for the software industry -- we wouldn't have to worry about patents anymore!
> Abstract software code is an idea without physical embodiment, and as such, it does not match §271(f)’s categorization: “components” amenable to “combination.” Windows abstracted from a tangible copy no doubt is information—a detailed set of instructions—and thus might be compared to a blueprint (or anything else containing design information). A blueprint may contain precise instructions for the construction and combination of the components of a patented device, but it is not itself a combinable component.
Courts do actually understand that software is an abstract mathematical idea. And this is the only sane way to treat software. Otherwise you'd have e.g. Lean proofs as patentable subject matter. There is no line you can draw where you say "this is software, and that is a proof." Formal reasoning (e.g. through types) is all over real world, useful software.
For what it's worth I've never actually encountered anyone who's even mentioned patents at work in the last decade. It's not a day-to-day concern that I've seen.
Courts did find MS liable for infringing on AT&T's patent for Windows installed on computers in the US. And this wasn't discussed at all in that court case; it was never challenged up to SCOTUS because it was plainly a violation.
Hence they could ship the intangible software itself abroad and install it without infringing on US patent law. Merely creating the software did not infringe.
In practical terms there is no point in entertaining the idea of software without any relation to a computer -- people are gonna' run software on a computer, that's what it's for.
However, there is no universe where they can hold a valid patent that would encumber a driver for a regular USB display device. What they then might try to do is invoke DMCA, due to the device having DRM responsibilities (HDCP).
If they get trusted HDCP treatment from media players on some platforms, they might fight tooth and nail to not be broken open in public as that might end up with them losing trust from content providers...
Or maybe they're just assholes with no real rhyme or reason, who knows.
Yeah, I suspect the whole patent claim is just a ruse to try and prevent people from looking into their likely insecure HDCP implementation.
The letter continued to claim that Lothian would be "single-handedly eviscerating DisplayLink's competitive advantage in this crowded market by educating our competitors and other third parties as to how we implement our proprietary technology"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_around
> Design-arounds are considered to be one of the benefits of patent law. By providing monopoly rights to inventors in exchange for disclosing how to make and use their inventions, others are given both the information and incentive to invent competitive alternatives that design around the original patent. In the field of vaccines, for example, design-arounds are considered fairly easy. It is often possible to use the original patent as a guide for developing an alternative that does not infringe the original patent.
I was pretty quick about it: they are now useless bricks.
We live in the golden age of USB-C + DP alt mode: USB C to the monitor, and that provides power, connection, video, monitor connects to a 30 euro docking with many USB, gigabit ethernet, additional video. No shitty drivers, no USB dropping randomly crashing your dock, no giant power brick and 300-something bricks.
Depending on the screen you can also daisy chain them.
Moving to a different desk require to just plug in one cable. One. And you can do all the above with an android phone, too, if it supports desktop mode you have a functional desktop inyour pocket (well, as much as a chromebook).
I have no need for those shoddy bricks anymore, or HDMI for that matter. (if only console makers and TV would drop HDMI, that would be a dream)
That said, very few people connect multiple external monitors to a laptop
E.g. I have a workspace for chat/communication apps because, for me at least, it's mentally easier to work with "messages are physically to my left" than "messages are workspace 3 and I get that by changing how my main view is" for some reason.
Also it's occasionally nice to be able to look at a short reference and type into another window without having to rearrange the layout itself.
But I do think people, even with multiple monitors, heavily underutilize workspaces and window management in general. Probably partly because Windows/macOS make it kind if awful by default and it takes intent and time to go learn something else. Hell, I've even seen IT veterans who hunt and pecked the keyboard straight to retirement!
The problem it solves is that if you have 3 screens (you can often get 3 gpu ouptus) then you are already OCD enough so you will need 4th screen to even them out.
They work well enough (I never pushed them hard but for office work). I remember on Linux having to recompile or update this or that when a software update broke them. It was sort of supported at the time.
I think most usb to hdmi devices were display link chip sets..
For a while I'd keep an eye on updates to see if they'd been fixed but they never were before we moved office.
I'm going to be quite sure we don't get any more in any future offices (we don't have them at our current office)
My only "wow this thing just works everywhere" was actually the Plugable brand docs. Obviously can't do things like 3D gaming, but for regular desktop kind of applications dang have these things been largely bulletproof. Especially the older USB 3.0 ones.
I still remember running five displays (including the built-in) off a single cheap HP Split X2 back in the day thanks to a Plugable dock.
https://www.onsemi.com/company/newsroom/news-and-insights/on...
They were slow with Linux support but had forums that were kind of helpful in the past. Where everyone went when the Ubuntu upgrade make the devices stop working and you had to rebuild.
https://www.displaylink.org/forum/forumdisplay.php?s=38fba65...
They seemed to had some kernel stuff that was open source for Linux.
They seemed to encourage community driver for non-Ubuntu Linux’s.
“ There is a community driven GitHub project at DisplayLink RPM which is generating RPM package for Fedora, CentOS Stream, Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux OS. It uses our code as the basis to create the RPM packages.”
https://github.com/DisplayLink/evdi
There may be situations where you need it, especially when you have bandwidth constraints or have to use a basic USB dock. But overall, I cannot recommend enough simply treating DisplayLink as anathema. (That's true on macOS and Windows as well as Linux.) It's a second-rate solution that we should consider obsolete on decent hardware as soon as possible.
Of course they might be able to stop one nonymous person but they can't stop everyone else from doing so, especially anonymously and with LLMs[1], or located in a country they can't reach. Triggering a Streisand Effect is easier than ever.
[1] People in the retrocomputing community are even vibe-porting/vibe-coding drivers for newer hardware on older OSes and vice-versa.
Why actually, given that even smartphones can drive Displayport alt mode over USB-C, and tablets can speak full Thunderbolt/USB 4? Is it cheaper to implement in dock and/or laptop hardware?
* I use a random (USB3) HP one
** There may be some lag/tearing, so maybe not so good for movies
I had an old Plugable USB 2.0 adapter laying around. I attached it to my 2025 vintage Moto phone, installed the "DisplayLink Presenter" APK and, I'll be damned-- I'm displaying my phone on a monitor.
Using a USB OTG hub, this adapter, a keyboard, and a mouse could actually make a reasonable desktop machine for RDP'ing and SSH'ing to other machines.
I haven't tried playing video but I suspect it would suuuuuuck over this USB 2.0 adapter. For text-based stuff, though, it seems completely reasonable.
Can someone explain this to me? Isn't this the whole premise of reverse engineering?
Patents can be avoided if you can prove that a patent is "obvious to a practitioner in the field" but that's a highish bar to prove in court and requires expensive lawyers
Nevertheless Synaptics are behaving as arse here and as a purely practical matter should be welcoming people who will bring them more customers for free
The whole reverse engineering clean room thing, is to show no copyright infringement and / or trade secret (primarily trade secret). How could they intentionally copy the code, if they cannot see the code.
Patents are far stronger in that sense, but they do have an expiration date. People independently come up with techniques and infringe patents all the time. Look up the patent litigation history of CRISPR which are still going strong it …
https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/nobel-prize-winners...
There’s a million examples.
For context, here’s my company IP Copilot - https://ipcopilot.ai/
Does UK patent law somehow work differently?
[0]: https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-earns-2-billion-pe...
Little did they know how much bigger that pyre would get lmao
Not as much as threatening to sue in one email, and then them asking to update a pull request on Github. I'd tell them to go pound sand too.
They are mostly obvious concepts for which prior art exists, at a glance. And should never have been granted.
Synaptics claims the driver work undermines their competitive advantage of proprietary connectivity methods, which means undisclosed, while patents trade disclosure for a monopoly
If someone happens to figure out how the undisclosed proprietary side works without exfiltrating trade secrets then there is no legal remedy, tough luck. Compete with customer support if you can
Pick a lane, Synaptics failed to pick a lane here suggesting there is some legal interoperability work outside of its patent claims, that abridges its non-patented trade secret claims, and I think that undermines their patent protection claim
Unbelievable mafia tactics from those clowns.
If you use any of their older products, it may be time to migrate away to more modern solutions, ideally ones made by companies that don't send legal threats to open source developers.
(I say boring, but this is definitely a good thing. See the Samba talks about GPLv3 from 2017 and 2011 for why)
https://static.lwn.net/images/pdf/Cease_and_Desist_Notice_Mi...
Fuck you, Synaptics.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/felony-contempt-busine...
Which is made funnier by the lawyer's name being Bateman. Sorry, could not resist that one.
What I find more ridiculous is the timing:
> You are to provide Synaptics, no later than 11:59 p.m. Pacific Time on October 11, 2026
The letter is dated "October 5, 2026". WTF are these lawyers smoking that they think 5 days is any reasonable time frame.
They just try to keep the pressure up so that the other entity gives up before they have time to estimate whether any of the claims are valid. One person against big corporation, which is threatening with big penalties. A common tactic.
If one guy can reverse-engineer everything with an LLM and some free time, I'm pretty sure their competitors can as well, and they won't be doing it out in the open like this guy was...
What fascinates me is the evidentiary question. How can courts satisfy themselves that (to adopt the EPO problem-solution approach) faced with a given problem, the mere prompting of an LLM was sufficient to arrive at a solution. Will we have consultants with zoos of LLMs providing evidence of their capability at a patent's priority date? Will patent offices need to provide examiners with access to the wayback machine for AI models? How can you, as the applicant, possibly argue with that? What degree of fiddling with the prompt to elicit a solution is fair?
You definitely don't need to cite the legal justification for every demand you make in a demand letter.
You don't even need to have a valid justification to make a demand in a demand letter... it is common and normal to make arbitrary demands... they are negotiations.
https://www.wipo.int/en/web/trade-secrets#systems
Now yes, they're fair game for reverse engineering, but that doesn't mean someone can't be mad about it and tell you not to do it.
So while I'm sympathetic to the defendant, DisplayLink docks work better as paperweights than actual devices.
also whoever this synaptics dude is sounds like a royal “a*hat”. It sounds like he reported them to legal and they decided to go crazy for no reason.
This is a codec only if you stand on your hands.
It’s rather sad they’re resorting to this, especially for someone doing something they themselves should’ve done.
In all honesty…. Good riddance.
Bad technology that doesn't deserve to exist, it seems. This is the kind of tech where it's better to finish off the RE work and release it anonymously to harm them. Adversarial interoperability, as Cory Doctorow would put it
Isn’t the whole point of a patent to make the “how” patently obvious so others may learn from it?
UK doesn't have software patents, so software cannot infringe them AFAIK.
But the best solution here is everyone avoid displaylink and synaptic stuff like its radioactive, fun side quest, a user class action now that they have formally accepted all responsibility for the dire state of the software support for their hardware.
Some questions that come to mind are:
Do you actually own the hardware?
Do you stop owning the hardware, meaning you're not allowed or able to use it once the company that's sold it to you stops providing or updating hardware?
Does every piece of hardware come with a guarantee that it will work on every piece of hardware that it's attached to forever?
These are just a few of the really troubling questions when people forget that software has to run on hardware. And the closer the software is to the core operation of a piece of hardware and equipment, the more topics like right to repair or right to maintain or right to optimize come up.
I never thought that a video card replacement driver would make me think of companies that are limiting Farmers from repairing and updating their own tractors.
The closest you can get is something like the Raptor Talos II, although parts of the hardware are still under patent.
Just looking at that guy's LinkedIn, you can tell he is 1) a doucher, and 2) thinks he was doing a good thing.
OCuLink doesn't even use drivers. It's literally just a PCIE passthrough. All usual tools apply, whereas DisplayLink encrypts all data, so a big fuckyou for getting logs.
Quit giving trash companies pounds of money for abuse at scale.
I used to connect a DL adapter to my Macbook for a third screen that was only used for chat, email and other low-bandwidth activity. It was all right, not great. Was glad to ditch it.
EDIT: Fixed now.
In any case, I am not a subscriber and I see it.
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https://lkml.rescloud.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/2610.1/1...
According to patent prosecution records, the independent claims for GB2484736 originally lacked any network transport limitations and were deemed entirely unpatentable against the prior art listed above.
To get the patent granted, DisplayLink’s attorneys amended the claims to specifically add delivery of the display data over a "general-purpose data network." The validity challenge relies on proving that adding a general-purpose transport layer (like USB or Ethernet) to existing image-compression methodologies was an obvious step and completely unoriginal in 2010, given the widespread existence of USB monitors and network-attached graphics at the time.
As far as I can tell, these patents only go up to claim 10 in the first place:
- https://patents.google.com/patent/GB2484736A/en
- https://patents.google.com/patent/GB2485613A/en
U not cleared to see it
So only the combination may be new. But this reminds me of a USPTO thing from my past.
The landmark ruling you are referring to is the U.S. Supreme Court case KSR International Co. v. Teleflex Inc. (2007), which led directly to the USPTO publishing its highly influential 2010 Examination Guidelines for Determining Obviousness. Under this framework, if element A is known and element B is known, combining them is not patentable if the combination yields nothing more than predictable results.
https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s2143.html
So, general-purpose data network, such as USB or Ethernet was known (A), claims Haar-transform decoding was known (B) [DE69909880T2 / EP0955609]. Even if we don't find this combination in prior art, it is dubious that this is patent worthy based on USPTO guidelines (combine A with B).
But I see a lot of stuff that suggests prior art:
1. Noriaki Yamazaki and Tetsuo Tanaka (2007). “ZYWRLE: Enhanced VNC Codec for Motion Picture.” IEICE Transactions, J90-D(7), pp. 1790–1798. Brief summary: Adds wavelet compression to VNC’s ZRLE codec for transmitting moving images, reducing network traffic to 20–50% of standard ZRLE. https://search.ieice.org/bin/summary.php?abst=j&category=D&i...
2. Joshua G. Senecal, Peter Lindstrom, Mark A. Duchaineau and Kenneth I. Joy (2004). “An Improved N-Bit to N-Bit Reversible Haar-Like Transform.” Proceedings of Pacific Graphics 2004, pp. 371–380. DOI: 10.1109/PCCGA.2004.1348368. Brief summary: Introduces PLHaar, a reversible Haar-like transform supporting lossy and lossless image compression without increasing coefficient bit width, suitable for bandwidth-limited video and graphics hardware. https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/15014239
3. Joshua G. Senecal, Mark A. Duchaineau and Kenneth I. Joy (2004). “Reversible n-Bit to n-Bit Integer Haar-Like Transforms.” Proceedings of the Data Compression Conference 2004, p. 564. Brief summary: Introduces lookup-table Haar-like transforms that preserve bit width and reversibility, with applications to fast image compression and streaming hardware such as DVI channels. https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/15013668
Good luck synaptic!
Also possibly related:
Method and apparatus for increasing memory resource utilization in an information stream decoder, https://patents.google.com/patent/WO1999057908A1/en
And a paper by a PHD student in 2005, Real-time Rendering with Wavelet-Compressed Multi-Dimensional Datasets on the GPU, https://cs.ucsb.edu/sites/default/files/documents/2005-05.pd...
Displaylink's own abandoned patent application talking about sending patches of compressed/uncompressed graphical data to the screen over USB: https://patents.google.com/patent/US20060119602A1/en
Using reference frames with Haar wavelet transforms in video compression, https://patents.google.com/patent/US6272180B1/en
It would take much human time to search for prior art across all of human knowledge for existing patents and new patents being proposed. But GPUs are tireless, and can continually grind towards success. They build their case for dismantling all existing active patents as long as they are kept fed.
If I were a frontier lab, I would be finding the most valuable patents, starting the research agents up, and then shorting companies that would see enterprise value decline if subject patents were invalidated (think Hindenburg or Culper Research activist investors). Just one way of monetizing the fancy search engine and token dispenser.
https://www.cloudflare.com/jengo/sable-prior-art-search/
https://www.eff.org/issues/patent-busting-project
After how many dollars spent? I mean, it is good that eventually bad patents get killed, but it still costs too much to do it, one at a time. We need a more streamlined process, maybe? Maybe an academic-review-like process at filing? Send the claims anonymously to a few experts in the field, randomly selected. If they all say it is obvious, kill it immediately and fine the company for wasting the patent office's time?
I think we could get the 7 grand together here.
My only concern is, what if some well-meaning person puts in a poorly constructed claim, and then that creates a counterproductive precedent.
I think ideally, someone like Software Freedom Conservancy or the Linux Foundation or the FSF or whoever would take charge of doing it, taking advice from patent attorneys in the process.
Maybe there is some UK patent attorney reading this who is willing to take it on pro bono?
If this were possible, patent holders would surely already be gaming it.
Since we are talking about the UK not the US
“patent attorney” vs “patent agent” is a US distinction. In the UK, “patent attorney” is the standard term for what is called “patent agent” in the US - someone who can appear before the patent office, but cannot (in general) practice law. [0] Now, unlike US patent agents, UK patent attorneys can actually appear in court for patent litigation (they all get some limited rights to do so, and can gain additional rights by undertaking advanced training) - however, in practice, you’d use an IP solicitor/barrister for any high value patent litigation, it is mainly at the low end that UK patent attorneys handle litigation independently of a solicitor or barrister. A solicitor or barrister who specialises in patent law doesn’t have to be qualified as a patent attorney, and although it is technically possible to do so, few actually are.
[0] Technically, the UK classifies patent attorneys as legal professionals-in popular parlance, “lawyers”-but unlike solicitors and barristers, who are generalist legal professionals permitted (in principle) to practice in any legal area, a patent attorney is a specialist legal profession whose scope of legal practice is officially restricted to intellectual property (they are allowed to advise on non-patent IP law matters such as copyrights, and also related commercial law matters such as IP contracts, but not on legal matters which have no connection with IP)
The patent system itself has been a moat and we will see more and more reasonable submissions that will force a rethink.