I do find using AI in a clean-room reverse-engineering project amounts to shooting yourself in the foot: you're sleep-walking into a legal minefield in an already legally gray field, and also risk over-relying on the AI's trial-and-error instead of developing a solid intuition of its functioning yourself.
At the same time, if we're being honest, Synaptics will have sent the C&D no matter what. They are an anti-consumer company with more lawyers than engineers, so of course they'll use all their resources to bully any competition, especially the most vulnerable.
The problem is not in reverse engineering, but in the existence of bogus software patents.
The threats of Synaptics are dangerous only because they claim patent infringement, for which it does not matter whether reverse engineering was clean or not.
All patents. Rent seeking behavior around loose ideas of all things should be destroyed. The western world has an inherent desire to innovate, you do not need to provide overbearing protectionism to enable motivated individuals to innovate and invent technologies and products to progress society.
Patents don't exist to encourage companies to innovate -- they exist to encourage companies to share information about their innovations.
I think you're exactly right that the western world would continue to innovate without patents. I think what you're missing is that the rent-seeking would continue as normal, simply by using trade secrets, obfuscation, services-models, etc.
But that's fine. I would prefer having the specs - that helps a lot in writing high quality drivers.
That said, open source relied a lot on reverse-engineering in the past - not to mention that reverse-engineering is much easier these days.
But not being able to e.g. merge a driver into the Linux Kernel because of a software patent is an actual, real blocker. Same thing with patent-encumbered codecs.
Patents was supposed to be a tool to enable competition, but does the reverse now - and it is holding as back as society. We should move away from it. Especially and specifically when it comes to vague, loose ideas just like the GP post says here.
Serious question: How does this worldview survive a collision with a stereotypical cancer-cure argument? Like, a pharmacological company needs to invest billions into R&D to invent a drug curing cancer. Without any kind of patent mechanism they will never be able to justify this kind of investment, cause the minute the release their drug, others can reverse engineer it and start selling generics of it for fraction of the cost because they never had to pay upfront R&D.
> you're sleep-walking into a legal minefield in an already legally gray field
I disagree. The WINE project settled all this reverse engineering legal nonsense a long time ago. They can file all the suits they want but they will just get dismissed.
They will not "just get dismissed". They will get dismissed after the defendent spends thousands, if not tens of thousands on legal defense to establish these assertions of yours to the satisfaction of a judge.
Clean-room reverse engineering involves two teams: one with access to the thing being reverse engineered, who write documentation of it, and the one in the clean room who do the implementation based only on the documentation. There's no reason you could not use AI for the first part, as the documentation is then evidence that you are only looking at behaviour and not source code.
Using it inside the clean room is more of an issue.
Clean-room reverse engineering gets around the copyright on the software. What the Synaptics legal people are arguing is that the code is infringing on two of Synaptics's patents, not on its copyright. Even if you have a completely new implementation of the code, it's still patent infringement if the code implements patented inventions.
If you use have the first team use one provider to write the spec and a completely different provider for the implementation team, I would expect you would be covered, but it probably will take the first players in this game to establish that precedent by having their cases tried in court.
Why do providers even matter? They are nearly identical weights produced from mostly overlapping corpa. You can reduce it to two instances but that only shows how fishy this copyright-laundring is.
The reason it's not "fishy laundering " is fundamental to copyright: copyright protects expression, not ideas. That's why in cases where expressing the same idea would result in the same text, the courts have ruled that the expression is not copyrightable rather than that this gives a monopoly to the first person to copyright it. (NB I am not a lawyer, etc)
Yeah, but the whole reason clean room RE uses two different teams of people is so you can demonstrate that the second team is not simply reproducing that the original expression -- it would have been impossible for them to do so because they had never seen it.
You lose that if you use an LLM which was trained on the original expression.
To keep the clean room clean, you'd need to use an LLM which you could prove had never seen the original.
Yeah, that's why I only argued above that you could use an AI for the first team. I thought the comment you were replying to meant all clean-room is fishy.
> It seems the jury is out on whether or not LLM outputs are considered “new” or not legally speaking.
Not exactly, and that's an unhelpful way to think about it. Copyright law, technically speaking, DGAF about whether you are using an LLM or not. Yes, there has been a lot of talk about whether LLM outputs qualify for copyright protection. And the answer isn't completely straightforward, but the ultimate answer doesn't have anything to do with LLMs -- the law requires a certain modicum of human creativity to qualify for copyright protection. So the real legal answer is that it depends less on whether you are using an LLM and more about how you as a human are using it. That line isn't well litigated yet -- but in general, if you want a copyright, you need to be ready to explain how human creativity was involved -- that's, by definition, the only thing copyright protects.
BUT, this doesn't matter at all in this situation, we're not questioning the copyright protection status of the LLM output, we're questioning whether it violates someone else's IP.
The point of clean room reverse engineering is a defense to prove you could not have violated IP rights of others (not just copyright, but also trade secrets, and patents). The entire point of the exercise is that the implementation team has never seen the original work, so it is impossible for them to have copied the expression. They only could have come to it coincidentally by implementing the idea in the same way. This protects you from a copyright lawsuit because copyright only protects expression, not ideas.
LLMs, are proven to possess the capability to reproduce expression: exhibited as overfitting and/or memorization. So, to form the same defense with an LLM, you'd have to prove that the LLM couldn't possibly be overfitting or repeating from memory. And the best way to do that is to do it the same way it is done with humans: you need to ensure they never saw (i.e. wasn't trained on) the subject of the reverse engineering.
If you don't do this, here's what happens:
You go to court, the plaintiff says "look, this code is basically the same as ours!". The defense says "no, we super duper promise we didn't copy it, we just coincidentally came up with very close to the same thing". They ask "well did your developers ever see our code before?" ...and... <drumroll> the outcome depends on that answer.
It's the exact same situation with an LLM. If it almost exactly produces something that is already copyrighted, the plain simple answer is that the model was overfitting or memorizing the training inputs. You need a believable defense to that.
I don't mean it in a personal way, I've seen many tech blogs trying to distill the topic down to something like that. It is inherently an oversimplification.
Well since most providers have cross session memory or things like it, using another provider would ensure you aren't leaking any information from the first step to the second step aside from the spec produced in the first step.
I thought synaptics had some sinister hold on the computer industry which sabotaged Windows 8.
Like when you looked at all the confusing and unwanted "2-in-1" and hybrid computer designs the thing you looked at was that they twisted themselves into pretzels to include... a trackpad! For most applications other than "working on an airplane" a true tablet with a bluetooth keyboard and mouse is so preferable but for various reasons the industry never showed it to you.
This is frustrating, I have had a growing distrust (and just frustration with the software in the first place) of DisplayLink with the Dock that I use, I would love alternative software.
This also just seems stupid to me, you don't pay for the DisplayLink software you pay for the hardware. More options for how to use your hardware would be a good thing to them would it not?
Though it sounds like much of the issue was that it wasn't really "clean-room" which is a separate issue. Though unclear if that really is at the root of it or not.
That's the problem when you have lawyers in charge. To a lawyer, Drivers and Hardware are the same thing: IP. That IP needs to be "protected", period, end of story.
Funny thing is hardly anyone wants to buy the bullshit their protecting anymore, enshittification is a direct result of the protectionist economy these lawyers created.
I've been an extremely unhappy DisplayLink customer because it's clear they don't care about their Linux customers, only I bought the thing because *Synaptics* advertised Linux support!
Vino is the only thing stopping me from throwing the damn thing away and makes me far more likely to buy another / recommend DisplayLink hardware to a friend.
The developer of the driver is in the UK. Given how the UK legal system works, I understand why the developer likely sees non-compliance with Synaptics’ demands as involving excessive personal risk.
However, there are many other countries worldwide whose legal systems are very different, and would be much less favourable to Synaptics—what will they do if (say) a Chinese or Russian developer takes over the project?
Considering Synaptics is approaching this from a software patent perspective, even somewhere closer like France is hostile towards software patents on the whole
> If you are not currently represented by competent legal counsel, I strongly recommend that you obtain legal representation promptly. You are going to need it.
"You are going to need it" sounds ominous.
I think the cat is somewhat out of the bag with open models around though, their capabilities for pretty much uninhibited RE are scary.
I just checked and there are some forks around you could salvage the original work from. I won’t post the links but I’m sure those motivated enough can find them.
After the absolute embarrassment that was accidentally leaving intra-node communication completely unencrypted and unauthenticated[0], I am doubtful on the level of seriousness of the whole project.
What ever was wrong with just selfhosting your own git server, again? Or mirroring it to a handful of different providers in different countries.
Yes, it was a big error, but it’s still an early stage project. Besides, if you’re hosting public repos, it didn’t matter.
Selfhosted git servers don’t automatically replicate without extra tooling and don’t provide collaboration and project tracking features. The goal is to replace something like Github with a distributed, automated, integrated setup. Not easy to accomplish.
Once it’s mature, this will create the ability to easily host project infrastructure across multiple nodes, owned by multiple people, where you can verify integrity as long as you accessed the repository in the past. If the hosting nodes are behind Tor, this will be a very secure setup. For repos that may face legal attacks, like emulators and tools like yt-dlp, this is huge.
I foresee a thriving ecosystem of software and hardware built by eating away at the exposed underbelly of a dying empire. Legal and moral considerations will shift as people face reality head-on, and those able enough to stand on their own will build a brave new world.
The time for the cyber/solar punk counterculture is now. It's more real, more fun, more dangerous than anything written about in fiction, a real world sandbox with epic scope and divine proportions.
This is an utterly confusing and self sabotaging system. I had lots of issues with displaylink on a Mac. (Daily crash on the first video call of the day for some reason) Does the support care? No. Can I debug using the logs? No - THEY'RE ENCRYPTED! And now they're fighting for customers to not be able to use the hardware.
Save yourself time and money - avoid DisplayLink.
At least part of the effort was posted in mailing list though https://lwn.net/Articles/1078474/ - I hope the recent repository has been mirrored too.
It’s hard when there’s no MST. But yes the DisplayLink drivers are shockingly bad. I often need to restart the driver/toolbox to get it to recognise my startech dock.
How can they simultaneously argue that 1) this is a patent infringement, the entire legal basis of the claim, and 2) it is a unlicensed disclosure of proprietary technology? The whole point of patents is to disclose technology.
Synaptics is a terrible company and DisplayLink is a steaming pile of shit. The only reason this god-awful display standard exists is that everyone from Apple to business laptops cheaps out on GPU hardware, necessitating docks to deal with this hacky workaround.
Even Apple has real GPU support for multiple displays now. It's time for DisplayLink to die.
Recently, I was shopping for docking stations or USB hubs. The lack of support for DisplayLink on Linux is a huge barrier for me. I won't buy a hub, docking station, or otherwise if it requires DisplayLink. If Synpatics didn't do this, I would have changed my filter to include their products and likely purchase DisplayLink technology. It's disappointing that they are intentionally blocking large segments of the market and free technology to make their products better and more profitable. I'm sure their lawyers are getting paid for this. I cannot understand this move by Synaptics any other way.
I'm not sure what lack of support you mean? I was able to get all of my Linux laptops working on DisplayLink with the drivers. I also had success with my Mac Neo that supposedly otherwise only can do one external display. Obviously, on Windows it works. All of the devices are the same - DisplayLink is resource heavy and slow, and mostly not usable for gaming even on newer docks/chipsets. It does however "Just Work" on almost anything.
I expect it to be plug and play on everything! Last I tried my dock did not work out of the box on the latest Ubuntu LTS, that is unacceptable.
It's clear that Synaptics doesn't have the software development resources to keep up with their drivers, if they had anyone competent in charge they would shift their focus all on hardware and embrace and encourage open source DisplayLink drivers. Now I'm in the same position, shopping for a new docking station that is not hostile users and stuck with Synaptics' worthless e-waste that I spent hundreds of dollars on! I'll never trust a company that keeps their drivers closed source ever again.
> In addition, as I have previously made clear to you, by open sourcing our proprietary DisplayLink technology for whatever personal reasons you may have as a "hobbyist," you 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 market-leading proprietary technology. We have gone to great lengths and great expense to prevent such disclosures and protect our market space. Your actions are potentially putting tens of millions of dollars of yearly corporate revenue at risk.
> In short, by your ongoing actions, you are effectively making a significant, dramatic, and grave business decision on behalf of Synaptics and DisplayLink that you have absolutely no authority to make. Given the magnitude of the potential damages at stake, we cannot and will not let this happen. We demand your immediate cessation of your infringing activities, and we will continue to escalate this matter through every available legal channel if you fail to comply.
> open sourcing our proprietary DisplayLink technology ... by educating our competitors and other third parties as to how we implement our market-leading proprietary technology
This makes no sense. If they're screaming about their patents then detailed specs of the tech would be publicly available via the patents office for whomever wants to have a look. They can't make an argument about losing competitive advantage because that's what valid patents are supposed to protect. And I think there is some kind of hobbyist-friendly clause in patent law, similar to fair use, that allows non-commercial 3rd party implementation of patents, so ultimately they have no valid argument against this, just deep pockets to bury hobbyists in legal fees for daring to clean-copy "their" tech.
IME, patents are generally not detailed specs of the tech. They're intended to detail higher level procedures or mechanisms to prevent competitors from introducing any kind of similar product that uses any kind of similar algorithm or idea. That's how patent trolls retain a competitive monopoly over their niche. You can't expect to reimplement a technology from its patents alone, even if the patent can aid in understanding something you have in front of you.
A valid patent must meet the enablement standard -- it doesn't need to be a full implementation, but it should enable a skilled professional reading it to reproduce the concept that it is covering.
The problem is that many companies are able to patent things that are too vague and use them as leverage even if they probably shouldn't be valid patents.
It is a balance, though. If you patent something too specific, e.g. irrelevant implementation details, your patent is worthless because anyone could just change the irrelevant parts.
> It is a balance, though. If you patent something too specific, e.g. irrelevant implementation details, your patent is worthless because anyone could just change the irrelevant parts.
Chemical companies love this -- just look at the refrigerant racket. Or the medicine racket. Both will wait until their current patent expires, then have a new slightly-modified one granted, and get the old product regulated out of existence. The end result is that they keep a monopoly for effectively life, even though expiring patents are supposed to eventually create an open market.
This works best in industries where chemicals need to be tested and approved before they can be used. Otherwise, one would be able to simply change irrelevant implementation details.
OK, what's stopping someone in a country that can both make the hardware chips and devices and use an LLM and just reverse engineer the chips and not do it publicly? FTDI had this happen with their USB to Serial chips did it not - before AI even was even usable. DisplayLink has been around for a long time; I'd almost wonder when the patents are due to expire (from some searching maybe 2028?) and all bets are off, China manufacturing will just clone it anyway from the patent.
nothing directly prevents you from doing that, but synaptic can block the import of products containing cloned parts and software which reduces the market to countries who don't have treaties with the US around respecting their patents/copyright/..
On my next relevant hardware purchase, I will try to ensure the complete absence of the market-leading proprietary technology belonging to that company. Glad some other good companies, like ElanTech, compete in this market.
I would be willing to spend some brain power to help improve this driver as well.
The stupid thing is that Synaptics benefits from a popular open source driver that is compatible with their hardware, spending tokens on this is an investment in the DisplayLink platform!
If Synaptics embraced open source they would have some respect and authority over the main line branch, instead now FireBurn has the respect and authority and Synaptics has our distrust and disdain.
Based on that quote, "legal contact" comes across as an utter moron who doesn't understand how anything works. Unfortunately, our corrupt corpo-first legal environment readily gives truncheons to such morons, with which they can bludgeon individual developers.
Thats where all the anti-DRM tools are, along with Bypass paywalls free, and a bunch of other useful "illegal" tools.
And the real answer: use OcuLink. It's just a PCIE lane->cable hardware, and is simple, cheaper, and just works. Doesnt even use drivers, as its just an extension of the PCIE lanes. Standard Linux tools work perfectly.
> That "Vino" driver for DisplayLink driver was a clean-room reverse-engineered DisplayLink driver that was developed in part by AI and written in Rust.
It is my strongly-held opinion that, regardless of what you think about AI in general, reverse engineering projects ought to stay as far away as possible from LLM code gen as possible. They are a very easy and straightforward way for a copyright owner to claim access to their code, since basically ALL code was trained on. Unless you have hard evidence the particular bit of code you want to RE was not in the training set, you should not use an LLM to reverse-engineer or rewrite it.
This is not a moral argument; as much as I hate AI companies playing fast and loose with other people's work, the underlying arguments that make RE legal work much better if you do not look at the source code. And while US judges are straining to keep AI training fair use, that does not make the AI a copyright laundering device. A copyright owner can absolutely reach through a fair use to get to you. Think of it like if you downloaded 10 different YouTube video essays on the same movie and attempted to stitch them together into a normal copy of the underlying movie. Obviously, your use has a different (and worse) legal status than the reviews do.
With typical clean room RE you get two artificers with clean copyrightbility - a fair use spec describing the system, a new implementation. This is not legally required, but the paper trail is a good defense.
If AI writes the spec, it may have just tainted itself if that work is then used to in future training. The output is not protected by copyright, but that probably doesn’t matter. If AI writes the output, there is no protection over that either, which may or may not matter.
Ultimately, however, this is a mechanical, derivative work. It isn’t washed because no creative human expression was introduced in either phase.
If the phases are split into AI writing the spec and human writing the implementation, and the spec is determined to be infringing, the implementation is infringing. The AI spec has no judgement over what’s copyrightable expression in the original, and there’s a high likelihood it produces an unauthorized derivative.
If a human writes the spec and an AI writes the code, the output is probably clean, but also not copyrightable. This is less of a concern for open source projects written by a single maintainer, but may have effects for larger projects or proprietary projects. However, writing the spec is the harder of the two parts and what people like using AI for.
Except in the most egregious cases, AI is not going to be found to be derivative or infringing. The consequences go far beyond this particular type of situation; it is being used everywhere by the richest corporations to produce all kinds of content. They will not allow those works to suddenly have questionable provenance.
Don’t look at tech companies that don’t care about laws and price that into their costs. Pay attention to publishers and what they allow. USCO has written opinions on this and doubled and tripled down on those opinions. AI doesn’t magically erase copyright.
> They will not allow those works to suddenly have questionable provenance.
Even though many of those "richest corporations" trained their models on huge quantities of torrented ("pirated") copyrighted content and other such "stolen" data. Nothing at all questionable there... LOL
Mostly agree. It's been super helpful for personal use but I don't think it's possible to achieve a true "clean room" implementation. Anything copyright encumbered should stay away.
On the other hand, it's been great for poking at cheap IoT devices and figuring out how to interact without crappy proprietary apps.
Counter Argument, if the code is propietary and well kept, how did the AI got trained on it? Didn't the copyright holder fail to protect his IP by letting AI train on it? If the specification is only released under NDA, how could a AI be trained on it?
I think the copyright holder should prove first in court, that his super secret specs or code was effectively used for training the AI.
But when LLM is used to create an image or video, the user usually consider the LLM as a copyright laundering device and claim full copyright on the produced image or video, regardless of what the licenses of the training set would be. Why coders don't get the privilege of that?
No, you cannot launder copyright through an LLM. It's the same for both images, video, and code; and that question is independent of whether or not it's legal to train the LLM on copyrighted data. The LLM training gets to be fair use, but fair use is not transitive. Infringement reaches through the LLM to get at any outputs which are substantially similar to the original no matter how many fair uses you put in the middle.
> Unless you have hard evidence the particular bit of code you want to RE was not in the training set, you should not use an LLM to reverse-engineer or rewrite it.
Wouldn't that be on Synaptics to prove? And with how protective they seem to be of their IP, I doubt their code is in the training set
Yes, but I'm giving the "defendant's lawyer" opinion. In reality, you can be completely tainted and still do good RE work, but proving that in a court of law will be harder.
And furthermore, the real victory is not in the courts; the real victory is staying out of the courts to begin with. If you win in court, you still lost huge sums of money. And a lot of staying out of court boils down to restricting one's conduct to things a plaintiff's lawyer would counsel against suing for. Hence why most legal opinions in the FOSS space are unusually conservative (while still, occasionally, just being completely off-base).
At the same time, if we're being honest, Synaptics will have sent the C&D no matter what. They are an anti-consumer company with more lawyers than engineers, so of course they'll use all their resources to bully any competition, especially the most vulnerable.
The threats of Synaptics are dangerous only because they claim patent infringement, for which it does not matter whether reverse engineering was clean or not.
I think you're exactly right that the western world would continue to innovate without patents. I think what you're missing is that the rent-seeking would continue as normal, simply by using trade secrets, obfuscation, services-models, etc.
Patents was supposed to be a tool to enable competition, but does the reverse now - and it is holding as back as society. We should move away from it. Especially and specifically when it comes to vague, loose ideas just like the GP post says here.
I disagree. The WINE project settled all this reverse engineering legal nonsense a long time ago. They can file all the suits they want but they will just get dismissed.
Using it inside the clean room is more of an issue.
You lose that if you use an LLM which was trained on the original expression.
To keep the clean room clean, you'd need to use an LLM which you could prove had never seen the original.
>To keep the clean room clean, you'd need to use an LLM which you could prove had never seen the original.
In this true though? It seems the jury is out on whether or not LLM outputs are considered “new” or not legally speaking.
Not exactly, and that's an unhelpful way to think about it. Copyright law, technically speaking, DGAF about whether you are using an LLM or not. Yes, there has been a lot of talk about whether LLM outputs qualify for copyright protection. And the answer isn't completely straightforward, but the ultimate answer doesn't have anything to do with LLMs -- the law requires a certain modicum of human creativity to qualify for copyright protection. So the real legal answer is that it depends less on whether you are using an LLM and more about how you as a human are using it. That line isn't well litigated yet -- but in general, if you want a copyright, you need to be ready to explain how human creativity was involved -- that's, by definition, the only thing copyright protects.
BUT, this doesn't matter at all in this situation, we're not questioning the copyright protection status of the LLM output, we're questioning whether it violates someone else's IP.
The point of clean room reverse engineering is a defense to prove you could not have violated IP rights of others (not just copyright, but also trade secrets, and patents). The entire point of the exercise is that the implementation team has never seen the original work, so it is impossible for them to have copied the expression. They only could have come to it coincidentally by implementing the idea in the same way. This protects you from a copyright lawsuit because copyright only protects expression, not ideas.
LLMs, are proven to possess the capability to reproduce expression: exhibited as overfitting and/or memorization. So, to form the same defense with an LLM, you'd have to prove that the LLM couldn't possibly be overfitting or repeating from memory. And the best way to do that is to do it the same way it is done with humans: you need to ensure they never saw (i.e. wasn't trained on) the subject of the reverse engineering.
If you don't do this, here's what happens:
You go to court, the plaintiff says "look, this code is basically the same as ours!". The defense says "no, we super duper promise we didn't copy it, we just coincidentally came up with very close to the same thing". They ask "well did your developers ever see our code before?" ...and... <drumroll> the outcome depends on that answer.
It's the exact same situation with an LLM. If it almost exactly produces something that is already copyrighted, the plain simple answer is that the model was overfitting or memorizing the training inputs. You need a believable defense to that.
I think that’s a bit of an undeserved framing personally
Like when you looked at all the confusing and unwanted "2-in-1" and hybrid computer designs the thing you looked at was that they twisted themselves into pretzels to include... a trackpad! For most applications other than "working on an airplane" a true tablet with a bluetooth keyboard and mouse is so preferable but for various reasons the industry never showed it to you.
Not something everyone values unfortunately.
This also just seems stupid to me, you don't pay for the DisplayLink software you pay for the hardware. More options for how to use your hardware would be a good thing to them would it not?
Though it sounds like much of the issue was that it wasn't really "clean-room" which is a separate issue. Though unclear if that really is at the root of it or not.
Vino is the only thing stopping me from throwing the damn thing away and makes me far more likely to buy another / recommend DisplayLink hardware to a friend.
However, there are many other countries worldwide whose legal systems are very different, and would be much less favourable to Synaptics—what will they do if (say) a Chinese or Russian developer takes over the project?
"You are going to need it" sounds ominous.
I think the cat is somewhat out of the bag with open models around though, their capabilities for pretty much uninhibited RE are scary.
Frankly all RE and emulation projects should at least have a mirror there.
What ever was wrong with just selfhosting your own git server, again? Or mirroring it to a handful of different providers in different countries.
[0] As previously covered on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49817524
Selfhosted git servers don’t automatically replicate without extra tooling and don’t provide collaboration and project tracking features. The goal is to replace something like Github with a distributed, automated, integrated setup. Not easy to accomplish.
Once it’s mature, this will create the ability to easily host project infrastructure across multiple nodes, owned by multiple people, where you can verify integrity as long as you accessed the repository in the past. If the hosting nodes are behind Tor, this will be a very secure setup. For repos that may face legal attacks, like emulators and tools like yt-dlp, this is huge.
Thousands of developers are going to do this now.
The time for the cyber/solar punk counterculture is now. It's more real, more fun, more dangerous than anything written about in fiction, a real world sandbox with epic scope and divine proportions.
Save yourself time and money - avoid DisplayLink.
At least part of the effort was posted in mailing list though https://lwn.net/Articles/1078474/ - I hope the recent repository has been mirrored too.
There's also https://github.com/durhamaustin9/DisplayLink-Drivers-Reconst... you may want to preserve locally.
Even Apple has real GPU support for multiple displays now. It's time for DisplayLink to die.
Would this be less prone to takedowns?
It's clear that Synaptics doesn't have the software development resources to keep up with their drivers, if they had anyone competent in charge they would shift their focus all on hardware and embrace and encourage open source DisplayLink drivers. Now I'm in the same position, shopping for a new docking station that is not hostile users and stuck with Synaptics' worthless e-waste that I spent hundreds of dollars on! I'll never trust a company that keeps their drivers closed source ever again.
> In addition, as I have previously made clear to you, by open sourcing our proprietary DisplayLink technology for whatever personal reasons you may have as a "hobbyist," you 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 market-leading proprietary technology. We have gone to great lengths and great expense to prevent such disclosures and protect our market space. Your actions are potentially putting tens of millions of dollars of yearly corporate revenue at risk.
> In short, by your ongoing actions, you are effectively making a significant, dramatic, and grave business decision on behalf of Synaptics and DisplayLink that you have absolutely no authority to make. Given the magnitude of the potential damages at stake, we cannot and will not let this happen. We demand your immediate cessation of your infringing activities, and we will continue to escalate this matter through every available legal channel if you fail to comply.
This makes no sense. If they're screaming about their patents then detailed specs of the tech would be publicly available via the patents office for whomever wants to have a look. They can't make an argument about losing competitive advantage because that's what valid patents are supposed to protect. And I think there is some kind of hobbyist-friendly clause in patent law, similar to fair use, that allows non-commercial 3rd party implementation of patents, so ultimately they have no valid argument against this, just deep pockets to bury hobbyists in legal fees for daring to clean-copy "their" tech.
The problem is that many companies are able to patent things that are too vague and use them as leverage even if they probably shouldn't be valid patents.
It is a balance, though. If you patent something too specific, e.g. irrelevant implementation details, your patent is worthless because anyone could just change the irrelevant parts.
Chemical companies love this -- just look at the refrigerant racket. Or the medicine racket. Both will wait until their current patent expires, then have a new slightly-modified one granted, and get the old product regulated out of existence. The end result is that they keep a monopoly for effectively life, even though expiring patents are supposed to eventually create an open market.
This works best in industries where chemicals need to be tested and approved before they can be used. Otherwise, one would be able to simply change irrelevant implementation details.
Now there are going to be hundreds of clones.
Synoptics deserves to lose everything, if this is how they want to behave.
The stupid thing is that Synaptics benefits from a popular open source driver that is compatible with their hardware, spending tokens on this is an investment in the DisplayLink platform!
If Synaptics embraced open source they would have some respect and authority over the main line branch, instead now FireBurn has the respect and authority and Synaptics has our distrust and disdain.
Thats where all the anti-DRM tools are, along with Bypass paywalls free, and a bunch of other useful "illegal" tools.
And the real answer: use OcuLink. It's just a PCIE lane->cable hardware, and is simple, cheaper, and just works. Doesnt even use drivers, as its just an extension of the PCIE lanes. Standard Linux tools work perfectly.
It is my strongly-held opinion that, regardless of what you think about AI in general, reverse engineering projects ought to stay as far away as possible from LLM code gen as possible. They are a very easy and straightforward way for a copyright owner to claim access to their code, since basically ALL code was trained on. Unless you have hard evidence the particular bit of code you want to RE was not in the training set, you should not use an LLM to reverse-engineer or rewrite it.
This is not a moral argument; as much as I hate AI companies playing fast and loose with other people's work, the underlying arguments that make RE legal work much better if you do not look at the source code. And while US judges are straining to keep AI training fair use, that does not make the AI a copyright laundering device. A copyright owner can absolutely reach through a fair use to get to you. Think of it like if you downloaded 10 different YouTube video essays on the same movie and attempted to stitch them together into a normal copy of the underlying movie. Obviously, your use has a different (and worse) legal status than the reviews do.
Also, fuck Synaptics.
With typical clean room RE you get two artificers with clean copyrightbility - a fair use spec describing the system, a new implementation. This is not legally required, but the paper trail is a good defense.
If AI writes the spec, it may have just tainted itself if that work is then used to in future training. The output is not protected by copyright, but that probably doesn’t matter. If AI writes the output, there is no protection over that either, which may or may not matter.
Ultimately, however, this is a mechanical, derivative work. It isn’t washed because no creative human expression was introduced in either phase.
If the phases are split into AI writing the spec and human writing the implementation, and the spec is determined to be infringing, the implementation is infringing. The AI spec has no judgement over what’s copyrightable expression in the original, and there’s a high likelihood it produces an unauthorized derivative.
If a human writes the spec and an AI writes the code, the output is probably clean, but also not copyrightable. This is less of a concern for open source projects written by a single maintainer, but may have effects for larger projects or proprietary projects. However, writing the spec is the harder of the two parts and what people like using AI for.
Even though many of those "richest corporations" trained their models on huge quantities of torrented ("pirated") copyrighted content and other such "stolen" data. Nothing at all questionable there... LOL
On the other hand, it's been great for poking at cheap IoT devices and figuring out how to interact without crappy proprietary apps.
I think the copyright holder should prove first in court, that his super secret specs or code was effectively used for training the AI.
Wouldn't that be on Synaptics to prove? And with how protective they seem to be of their IP, I doubt their code is in the training set
And furthermore, the real victory is not in the courts; the real victory is staying out of the courts to begin with. If you win in court, you still lost huge sums of money. And a lot of staying out of court boils down to restricting one's conduct to things a plaintiff's lawyer would counsel against suing for. Hence why most legal opinions in the FOSS space are unusually conservative (while still, occasionally, just being completely off-base).