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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.

Synaptics: “Look what you made me do to you!”

How much ram does DisplayLink use?

no, a patent is exclusive right to implement, you can't get around it by reverse engineering

the tradeoff is that it becomes free eventually, unlike trade secrets

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.

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.

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.

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 …

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/

They make money by authoring standards which force vendors to buy even more parts/licenses from them.

DisplayLink was acquired by Synaptics in 2022

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?

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.

If you want to know whether any relatively modern computer hardware is encumbered by IP restrictions, it's pretty simple, the answer is yes.

The closest you can get is something like the Raptor Talos II, although parts of the hardware are still under patent.

Microsoft Is Making An Astonishing $2 Billion Per Year From Android Patent Royalties[0].

[0]: https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-earns-2-billion-pe...

Felony contempt of business model?

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/felony-contempt-busine...

> Fuck you, Synaptics.

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.

It seems they made it available.

AFAIK, links to LWN pages are intentionally always visible to non-subscribers.

In any case, I am not a subscriber and I see it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

> Are paywalls ok?

> It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds.

> In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so. But please don't post complaints about paywalls. Those are off topic. More here.

> mapping claim 11 of DisplayLink GB Patent No. 2484736 and claim 11 of DisplayLink GB Patent No. 2485613 to your Vino driver source code

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

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.

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!

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.

X11? RDP?

> 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?

Disturbing that this pretty reasonable take was flagged.

The patent system itself has been a moat and we will see more and more reasonable submissions that will force a rethink.