Synaptics Appears to Use Legal Threats to Block Open-Source DisplayLink Driver (phoronix.com)
104 points by snvzz 5 hours ago
pona-a 3 hours ago
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.
adrian_b 27 minutes ago
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.
echelon 6 minutes ago
I'm not sure patents make sense anymore in the post-AI era.
datakan an hour ago
> 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.
ajb 2 hours ago
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.
voakbasda 2 hours ago
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.
pona-a 2 hours ago
freeAgent an hour ago
This is, famously, how Compaq created IBM-compatible PCs.
nerdjon 2 hours ago
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.
ectoloph an hour ago
> 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.
ada-h00k 4 hours ago
I hope someone has archived the repository so it can be hosted somewhere where those ridiculous Western copyright and patent laws don't apply.
discordance 2 hours ago
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.
iamnothere 3 hours ago
Should have hosted it on Radicle, with the main node served over Tor.
Frankly all RE and emulation projects should at least have a mirror there.
jubilee33 2 hours ago
Didn't know about this, nice project thanks !
echelon 2 hours ago
This is going to cause Striesand Effect.
Thousands of developers are going to do this now.
nijave 3 hours ago
If they were smart, they'd welcome an effort to make DisplayLink not a piece of trash.
Garlef 2 hours ago
Why not open source an extensive test suite for such a driver (without the actual driver)?
Would this be less prone to takedowns?
ctkhn 3 hours ago
Can't wait til there's a good alternative. Displaylink is such a pain
pantalaimon 10 minutes ago
FL2000 is a cheap alternative where the vendor does provide example code that is free to use
stuaxo an hour ago
Project should have generated some specs that a follow up clean room project could use.
viraptor 4 hours ago
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.
There's also https://github.com/durhamaustin9/DisplayLink-Drivers-Reconst... you may want to preserve locally.
jeroenhd 31 minutes ago
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.
paaloeye 2 hours ago
clean-room + AI + Rust together equals incoming C&D pretty much instantly
kittikitti 2 hours ago
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.
hypercube33 an hour ago
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.
nekusar 2 hours ago
NEXT TIME, PUBLISH TO gitflic.ru
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.
LoganDark 2 hours ago
Holy shit, this legal contact is utterly pissed:
> 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.
skeledrew an hour ago
> 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.
hypercube33 an hour ago
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.
123987128369955 an hour ago
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.
echelon 2 hours ago
Streisand Effect.
Now there are going to be hundreds of clones.
voakbasda 2 hours ago
I myself would be willing to spend tokens helping to improve this driver.
Synoptics deserves to lose everything, if this is how they want to behave.
echelon 8 minutes ago
kmeisthax 3 hours ago
> 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.
Also, fuck Synaptics.
Orygin 12 minutes ago
> 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
kmeisthax 3 minutes ago
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).
jonhohle 2 hours ago
I’ve been warning about this for a long time.
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.
voakbasda 2 hours ago
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.
blooalien an hour ago
nijave 3 hours ago
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.