Not Quite Gratitude
9 April 2008 - 7:55am — Christopher Wright
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Comic Transcript
AUDIOMOD517: You're threatening to sue me?
ALICE: Not only are we threatening to sue you, we're drawing up all the papers so we can move from "threat" to "action" in as short a time as possible.
AUDIOMOD517: But I don't understand, I thought I was doing you a favor.
ALICE: How exactly is reverse engineering and modifying our intellectual property a favor?
AUDIOMOD517: Your Nifty Doorways Verandah drivers were incompatible with your old sound cards. I made them compatible!
ALICE: And for that you must pay.
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Comments
I must say
The fact that this has really happened truly saddens me. This would be a funny comic if not for this actually happening. A guy who spends his spare time helping others with their compatibility problems and being kicked in the nuts for doing it. These people should be applauded, not apprehended.
Indeed. Of course, they
Indeed.
Of course, they justify it by saying that allowing modded drivers leads to confusion between those and non-modded ones, so people will blame problems from the modded ones on them, they'll also say that their drivers are their own IP, so you aren't allowed to alter them without their permission.
But really, I find the whole idea of close-sourced drivers to be ridiculous in the extreme.
What if the modders distributed patches only?
Say they publish the following:
1) A filename or set of filenames (plus checksums) for the original drivers, as distributed by the manufacturer
2) A set of difference patches to be applied to the original file(s)
3) Checksums of the resulting patched file(s)
How could the manufacturer stop them, legally, I mean?
Yeah, they could re-issue the old drivers with trivial differences, so as to defeat the checksum tests. This might lead to an "interesting" game of cat and mouse...
Legally?
I imagine that any modification of software would be a violation of the DMCA. Which is an astoundingly bad law, but there it is.
"Astoundingly bad law"
There you have it. For a long time now, as one of your neighbours to the north (Montreal, QC, to be precise), I have been observing the shenanigans of your law-making folks with dismay and amazement. And then there is the uneasy feeling that the majority (of those of you who cared to vote) actually DID elect those fools, time after time. Not that we have a perfect record on this matter over here, you understand...