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Texas Instruments sent a DMCA takedown to a site archiving data sheets
- mjevans 6y agoUsing copyright tools to try to contain published documentation of facts about anything is roughly where, if possible, I boycott anything involved with that company to the maximum reasonable extent. It is clear that TI no longer has an interest in developing new products, or figuring out better ways of making existing products, and would instead like to rent-seek and make the world a smaller place.
- ChuckNorris89 6y agoThat was clear when Nokia fell and took down TI's OMAP processors with them and they just gave up to Quallcomm's Snapdragon without even putting up a fight. TI is now just rentseeking on their ananlog dominance and whatever sinking boat Intel is, TI is way worse.
- pjmlp 6y agoExcept Nokia is pretty much around, their business was more than just mobile phones, and happen to own Bell Labs nowadays.
- johnnycerberus 6y agoNokia's Bell Labs is only focused on 5G and 6G technologies. I mean judging by the papers they release they are now a far cry from the wide research spectrum that they had before.
- pjmlp 6y agoThe point being they still exist and focus on what is profitable.
- alexhutcheson 6y agoTI might not be focused on phones and multimedia devices anymore, but their DSP chips are extremely well regarded, and some of their other chips are popular for industrial automation. I don’t think “rentseeking on their analog dominance” is a fair characterization.
- cushychicken 6y agoIt's hard not to view this sort of stuff as saber rattling (or, more accurately, whining) from the OSHW community. TI is more than happy to work with you on their most cutting edge designs if you're shipping in appreciable volume. Talking a quarter million chips or more per year. That's just the way the wind blows in their business. Gotta recoup as much R&D expenditure as possible up front. I've worked with them on these sorts of designs. They employ tons of really sharp engineers and still make lots of high quality, very useful chips. You just have to buy enough of them for it to be worth it for TI to work with you. No OSHW application I know of has ever moved enough units to cross this bar. Not even close.
- snoopen 6y agoWhat makes you think it's the OSHW community? If TI will work with you only if you're high vol then I could see a lot of smaller businesses seeing this tactic working against them too.
- cushychicken 6y agoIn TI's eyes - that is, through the lens of order volume and support needed by the customer from TI - the difference between a single small business building HW and a single OSHW is negligible. They get way more ROI by heavily supporting bigCos who will give them millions of dollars of business YOY rather than helping a zillion mom and pop shops who can barely wire a resistor the right way. Think of it as a tacit strategy of "firing your worst customers". Having worked in bigCo vs small Co, there are a lot of small Co and OSHW EEs who barely have a clue what they're doing. It's not worth TI's time or money to help these people out. Upleveling lousy engineers thru support only to net them a 10 piece part order, is a really lousy ROI. (Unless of course we're talking an ASIC or some other astronomically high ROI custom piece. But, I'm assuming that we're not, because I don't work for a military prime contractor.)
- foldr 6y agoTI have some sweet analogue products with very high performance and (just as importantly) excellent documentation. For example I've been very happy with https://www.ti.com/product/TPS61098 https://www.ti.com/product/TPS61098 If you're not trying to shave every cent off BOM costs, it's worth paying a premium for high quality datasheets.
- bayindirh 6y ago> TI is now just rentseeking on their ananlog dominance and whatever sinking boat Intel is, TI is way worse. Burr Brown opamps and DSPs are enough to keep the legacy of TI alive. OMAPs are just DSPs with processor cores. They were not designed to be fast first.
- sokoloff 6y agoIf they created that analog dominance, it’s hard for me to see that as rent-seeking. Cash cowing perhaps.
- BostonEnginerd 6y agoThey made a conscious decision to focus their efforts on where they're able to be a leader. They saw early on that they couldn't compete in advanced logic with the Asian foundries without making astronomical investments -- so they decided to compete in a non-feature size dominated market.
- syshum 6y agoTI is about 10 years ahead of Intel, but rest assured we will be commenting on threads about Intel doing things like this in 10 years or less
- redis_mlc 6y agoI remember the "golden age" of chip makers in the 80s giving a bookshelf of datasheets to every engineer who asked. (At the time, if you mailed a circuit design to an inside rep, he would also mail you all the chips for free to build it, regardless of price.) Since then, some mfgs. have been restricting datasheets to avoid potential patent litigation. This might be the case here. Possibly another example of death by a thousand cuts as our society gets more regimented.
- matheusmoreira 6y agoComputers in the 80s also came with schematics that showed users how to repair, modify and extend their system. I've seen videos of people hooking up their electronics projects to a C64.
- ZeWaren 6y agoAll datasheets should be uploaded to libgen or similar platforms so that they're always accessible to anyone needing them.
- dvfjsdhgfv 6y agoI hope someone takes care of this.
- benedikt 6y agonever uploaded anything to libgen, but i am setting up a http mirror of this and will also provide a .zip file, to make it easy for others to download the whole collection. posting the link here when its done, then someone else can submit this to libgen and other places.
- benedikt 6y agomy mirror is here: https://mirrors.deadops.de/ti/ https://mirrors.deadops.de/ti/ zip file (8gb) here: https://mirrors.deadops.de/ti.zip https://mirrors.deadops.de/ti.zip
- LargoLasskhyfv 6y agoTerminally inconvenient!
- b1ackb0x 6y agoI don’t understand why chipmakers seem to always restrict access to documentation on chips. Their competitors will get it anyway. This only creates more problems for small developers.
- b1ackb0x 6y agoLast time I had to find in-depth documentation on a fairly common and new SONY image sensor, there was nothing available officially, found it in some chinese file sharing site though. Seems like they are shooting themselves in the foot by not opening it.
- varispeed 6y agoI think this may be some bigger market fixing situation - only big and already established corporations would get documentation preventing any competition to emerge.
- blowfish721 6y agoCould it be a legacy culture thing? If you’ve ever dealt with traditional broadcast vendors it’s the same thing there, impossible to get even basic documentation and manuals without having an authorized account in most cases. Really is frustrating when you try to shop around for a new setup and all you can get is marketing material.
- Tepix 6y agoThis is obviously wrong. The best way to remedy this is probably to contact TI as a (potential) investor, not complain here. Link: https://investor.ti.com/resources/contact-us https://investor.ti.com/resources/contact-us
- williamtwild 6y agoShort of the 1% it is unlikley they are going to care about your $500 in an IRA or some robinhood junky
- crististm 6y agoThe contact-us is a box to speak into that would make you feel better that you did something when you hit 'send'. If you think you will achieve anything significant with it, think again. Imagine that _you_ are TI and you receive a couple of messages there. You will think (probably even anticipate) this is clearly the public's reaction to a decision that you thought through, which is not a typo or day-to-day error. So you will thank them for their concern and will carry on with your business! A better remedy would be to publicly shame them about what they just did. TI will still carry on with their business but others will just know better than to engage with TI in the future!
- bborud 6y agoIn my experience (from a few large companies) I'm afraid this would accomplish exactly nothing. It is wishful thinking. The only way to reach most companies is to turn up on their PR radar. If something is seen as potentially damaging to their brand your concern will enter the company at a place in the organization which will have a far more direct channel to someone who can make decisions. If you go through their investor feedback channel, unless you own a fair chunk of shares in the company or represent major shareholders, they will ignore you. Of course, if you are a major investor you wouldn't contact them through that channel anyway. You would already have a relationship to someone in, or close to, top management who is responsible for handling major stakeholders.
- Tepix 6y agoYou want to get the message through to those who are responsible. Whether it's via the Investor contact or the Press contact doesn't really matter, as long as whoever came up with this decision has to justify it in front of the other executives.
- laydn 6y agoTI has also cancelled distribution agreements with several of their top distributors recently. (Avnet, etc). They have a few global distributors remaining, and if you talk to any of them for a new design, you'll notice they try to avoid promoting TI parts because of TI's new pricing and commission policies.
- PoachedSausage 6y agoI had noticed that the UK distributors that I use on a regular basis, RS and Farnell, have stopped hosting TI's datasheets on their sites. It makes it quite annoying to make a quick check to see if the part does what I want. Whats up at TI? They used to be great for datasheets and Appnotes.
- bborud 6y agoDoes this indicate that TI are in financial trouble?
- lights0123 6y agoNothing like making it harder to buy their products if they're in trouble!
- bborud 6y agoIt isn't unthinkable that some customer segments cost more to support than they generate in direct revenue - that is: are inefficient. So spending less on customers and sales channels that are inefficient may save them money. I'm not sure that would explain them attempting to limit the availability of their datasheets though. That doesn't make much sense to anyone.
- Taniwha 6y agoMarketing stupidity at its highest - if they were doing their job properly they would be doing everything possible to put their data sheets in front of as many designers as possible - I'll just find someone else's part that does the job and choose that
- b1ackb0x 6y agoAnd it’s not just TI, the whole industry is like that. Not only datasheets, most of developer documentation is not available for very common chips.
- varispeed 6y agoFor example Apple is known for having part suppliers to not sell parts to third parties. I wouldn't be surprised if these type of deals but more secret existed, so that big corporations can ensure there won't be any new competition coming up, as they wouldn't have the same access to parts or documentation.
- neya 6y agoCool, I was just going to use a TPA series amplifier for my commercial design this year. I'm just going to switch to ST Microelectronics which is what Bose et al use anyway. Good riddance. If you are stupid enough to DMCA 555 timer datasheets, you just shot yourself in the foot.
- rpaddock 6y agoBeing located in France ST is having a lot of personal issues right now. Lots of ST parts are getting hard to get so make sure you can get it. The ones you can get are going up in price.
- neya 6y agoThank you, that's very useful to know.
- numlock86 6y agoGood choice on ST. I can only recommend their products. While some tools are still wonky and quite archaic (which is sadly pretty much the standard in the industry) their tools are the lesser bad ones.
- contingencies 6y agoUnfortunately their IDE doesn't work at all on OSX, their support crawls, and it's obvious they are internally French as in bureaucracy.
- consp 6y agoConsidering OSX is a niche market, why not dual boot?
- contingencies 6y agoVM + Linux better solution but still a PITA.
- lmilcin 6y agoWhile I wonder to what end TI does this and whether this is even legal, I don't see much problem for me as a hobbyist EE. I just refuse to buy parts without datasheet except for parts that don't need explaining.
- Mizza 6y agoI once got a DMCA takedown request (well, Wikipedia did because of my edit) from Texas Instruments for the following numbers: p = B709D3A0CD2FEC08EAFCCF540D8A100BB38E5E091D646ADB7B14D021096FFCD q = B7207BD184E0B5A0B89832AA68849B29EDFB03FBA2E8917B176504F08A96246CB d = 4D0534BA8BB2BFA0740BFB6562E843C7EC7A58AE351CE11D43438CA239DD9927 6CD125FEBAEE5D2696579FA3A3958FF4FC54C685EAA91723BC8888F292947BA1 which can be used to sign firmware for the TI-83+. This lead to the creation of the Wikipedia "black lock" on articles, meaning they can't be edited because of internal Wikipedia corporate policy, which didn't previously exist. Wikipedia eventually won the dispute, and they host the numbers here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments_signing_key_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments_signing_key_...
- suifbwish 6y agoJust wait till GAN neural networks are more wide spread and refined. Is someone liable for copyright violation if their GAN neural network was trained on copyrighted images? The a refined version of the resulting GAN model can be used in reverse to generate false convincing variations of the original copyrighted media. Is anyone liable?
- monocasa 6y agoI hope it doesn't turn out like patents, where everyone is infringing and there's a huge pressure to own "defensive" bodies of works. In this context I can see that being another pressure which assures that large models are only able to be built by FAANG style companies.
- yummypaint 6y agoShould not be different than a human artist producing something after looking at other media. The purpose of copyright is supposed to be to allow people to profit from their works by prohibiting their distribution by others. It seems to me the question of whether one work is a copy of another would be made on the basis of the works themselves, and should be independent of who the artists were. There is also a right to parody, and no inherent reason parody can't be produced in an automated fashion.
- blargmaster42_8 6y agoThanks Biden
- roland35 6y agoOne project I was thinking of doing was creating a database of microcontrollers from all the vendors in one place. This was actually something that crossed my mind - would I even be allowed to host datasheets? It would be impossible to get all the vendors to agree to anything and it seems like TI at least does NOT want anyone hosting their information. I suppose a simple URL would be OK though!
- thefiregecko 6y agoI think octopart.com does most of what you're suggesting. I would be interested to see how you could improve on it.
- xondono 6y agoI’m going to post the unpopular opinion here and say that this is OK in my book. This archive is distributing out of date documentation without making it clear that it’s out of date. This could cause a major problem for someone that uses it. The documentation for the same chip is perfectly available on TIs website, although to get older datasheets you’ll need to dig further (by design). There’s a ton of sites mirroring datasheets, and they weren’t DMCA. It looks like someone at TIs legal got creative about how control this sites to update their info.
- phendrenad2 6y agoIt's possible, and would also mean that TI didn't attempt to talk to bitsavers to get a new page added to the front of the old datasheet, which says "this is severely outdated and we have a nicer newer datasheet at ti.com - sincerely, Person McHuman, TI writer" and instead went right for takedown.
- tsomctl 6y agoIt's a perfect example of the general shittiness of life. Just little things that, in of themselves, aren't bad, but they add up to make everything more difficult. Once an IC is designed, the datasheet doesn't substantially change. It isn't a computer program that gets continuous updates every couple of months. They might add some errata for some corner cases or clarification. What happens when the IC is discontinued? I still need the datasheet, so I can understand the circuit when finding a replacement IC.
- xondono 6y agoThe datasheets in question are from parts like 555 and logic, parts that are functionally generic. No one has a doubt about how it works, but details like timmings specification and other small print parameters have had a lot of changes, because the design has been ported along each time the manufacturing process has changed. It’s cases like the one you mention when you want to know that the new parts have different parameters and you might need to change other components to compensate.
- colonwqbang 6y agoThis is Distrelec they are DMCAing. That's a company that's trying to sell their chips for them. Yeah...
- Noxmiles 6y agoThat is the problem, when many sites are hosted in the same country (USA). DMCA = US law.
- yarcob 6y agoI'm trying to come up with an explanation why TI would do that. The only explanation I can come up with is that TI wants a closer relationship with their customers. They don't want to be a commodity chip producer. When distributors host the datasheets, then customers would probably never visit TIs website, and just compare chips from multiple vendors on the distributors website. Customers are just going to pick the cheapest part that matches the specs. Maybe TI wants to be seen as a premium vendor. They don't want customers to look for a LED driver on an electronics distributors website, they want you to look for a TI LED driver on ti.com. They can explain the benefits of their chips much better on their own website. As someone who occasionally tinkers with electronics, I think this decision by TI sucks. I like that Mouser and Reichelt host all their datasheets. But I guess TI doesn't care if I'm going to buy two LM3886s or not.
- minimuffins 6y ago> I'm trying to come up with an explanation why TI would do that. When I hear these kind of stories I always wonder this too. Like, who was allowed to turn this into a company policy and why on earth did they think it worth their time? Usually something that would seem to harm the public image and goodwill of the firm. This speculation in this comment seems pretty convincing imo: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25683856 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25683856 (mainly the part about legal getting into the driver seat in a semi-fossilized sort of company like TI).
- rpaddock 6y agoI received a takedown demand from them because I had one of their documents on space grade parts on my site. The main reason I put it on my site was because they made the document hard to get, otherwise I would have just put up a link to it. It was clearly a Bot. A human would have seen it as a promotion for a line of obscure TI products.
- solarkraft 6y ago> A human would have seen it as a promotion for a line of obscure TI products. You'd think that for all the cases in which data sheets get taken down. Unfortunately TI doesn't seem to.
- benedikt 6y agohey, i set up a mirror here: https://mirrors.deadops.de/ti/ https://mirrors.deadops.de/ti/ and a zip file (8gb) here to download in bulk (or for others to make their own mirrors): https://mirrors.deadops.de/ti.zip https://mirrors.deadops.de/ti.zip
- kuon 6y agoFrom now on I will always try to avoid TI components in my new designs. I hope other companies will use this to embrace open source more.
- Unklejoe 6y agoIt's funny because most (if not all?) of their datasheets are freely available for download right from their website. Why would they bother doing this?
- rjsw 6y agoI was told that they sent one to Bitsavers for the TI Explorer Lisp Machine documentation.
- supermatt 6y agoIts not even that TI are asking to de-index data sheets - they are asking to deindex TI products from 3rd party stores. For example, DMCA notice: https://www.lumendatabase.org/notices/18049758?access_token=2m7aiYaan5NA2ozEix0OPg https://www.lumendatabase.org/notices/18049758?access_token=... First link from "ALLEGEDLY INFRINGING URLS": https://www.distrelec.de/en/multivibrator-monostable-pdip-texas-instruments-sn74ls123n/p/17393178 https://www.distrelec.de/en/multivibrator-monostable-pdip-te... They are pretty much all the same - product links. Did google simply obey this and delist the URLs? How is this even legal. TI recently dropped some distributers - maybe they are doing this as a way of removing 3rd party retailers under guise of copyright violations - DMCA abuse, pure and simple. Should be HEAVY penalties for this kind of crap.
- hedora 6y agoThere are heavy penalties: http://digital-law-online.info/lpdi1.0/treatise15.html http://digital-law-online.info/lpdi1.0/treatise15.html The courts could (and should) render TI’s underlying copyrights unenforceable. Sadly, the cited precedent is from 1990, and I don’t know of any more recent cases. edit: I also just posted this as a top-level article. People in the tech community should have a broader understanding of this line of legal defense. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25686276 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25686276
- yummypaint 6y agoThere need to be automatic steep fines for filing fraudulent DMCA requests. The process is totally asymmetrical, rampantly abused, and there is no realistic recourse for victims. In practice people rarely sue afterward, due to further asymmetries. If not an automatic $1k+ fine for false claims, we badly need some ambulance chaser style law firms who solely seek out copyright victims and charge fees only as a fraction of damages awarded.
- syshum 6y agoCopyright was designed to further human civilization as now become one of if not the greatest threat to the advancement of human civilization. Copyright must be reworked,and reduced. back to AT MOST the original 14 years plus 1 extension of 14 year to the original human creator (not a company) Failure to do this will continue to see humanity limited in our growth