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." ?

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.

“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.

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

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

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 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.)

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.

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.

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

https://www.onsemi.com/company/newsroom/news-and-insights/on...

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.

Unbelievable mafia tactics from those clowns.

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...

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.

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

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.

> The following subscription-only content has been made available to you by an LWN subscriber. Thousands of subscribers depend on LWN for the best news from the Linux and free software communities. If you enjoy this article, please consider subscribing to LWN. Thank you for visiting LWN.net!

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

> 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.

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.

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