7 ms·
What if a third-party reverse engineers the specifications and releases an open driver, regardless of what the HDMI Forum wishes?
by ronsor 11mo ago
What if a third-party reverse engineers the specifications and releases an open driver, regardless of what the HDMI Forum wishes?
- asadm 11mo agoyeah I am curious too. Could I legally just reverse engineer that binary and re-implement it?
- EvanAnderson 11mo agoThe typical "clean room" process would be to have one group reverse-engineer the original and document it, then have another group of "un-tainted" people implement the spec. This methodology has been shown to be an effective shield against copyright infringement, but it does not protect you from patent infringement. Presumably the spec is patent-encumbered specifically to prevent this type of "attack". You also wouldn't have any rights to use any HDMI-related trademarks.
- nradov 11mo agoIn general to avoid IP legal problems in the USA you can't do all of that yourself. Generally one party has to do all of the reverse engineering and write a specification based on that. Then another party can take that specification and write a "clean room" implementation. https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/how-compaqs-clone-computers-skirted-ibms-patents-and-gave-rise-to-eisa/ https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/how-compaqs-clone-comp...
- ctoth 11mo agoI've been thinking about this recently. What if one of the parties is an LLM?
- jsheard 11mo agoWho knows, someone will have to get dragged into court to set that precedent one way or the other.
- drdaeman 11mo agoI think we’re waiting for the courts to deem LLMs able to sidestep any copyright and contract laws. If they do, artists and writers may be pissed, but engineers are gonna be lit (as long as they hate current status quo of nothing being interoperable)
- charcircuit 11mo agoAre there examples where a single person doing it gets successfully sued? It could just be that those companies were extra risk adverse so they came up with monetarily inefficient ways to defend themselves.
- AnthonyMouse 11mo agoIt's sort of the other side of that coin. There was a case where a company did it like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean-room_design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean-room_design The courts said that was fine, and whenever that happens, lawyers are going to tell people to do it exactly like that since it's a known-good way to do it, whereas some other way is maybe and who wants a maybe if you have the option to lockstep the process that was previously approved? Of course, if you do it a different way and then that gets approved, things change. But only after somebody actually goes to court over it, which generally nobody enjoys, not least because the outcome is uncertain.
- charcircuit 11mo agoSure, but "can't" is a strong thing to say, when actually the result is thought to be legally untested.
- AnthonyMouse 11mo agoYou have to understand where "can't" comes from. It's a multi-layered system. If the government says you can do it one way and then the corporation's lawyers tell them to do it that way, corporate policy then becomes that you have to do it that way, and you therefore "can't" do it some other way. This is why government regulations often create perverse incentives and unintended consequences. You can't just consider what the rule says, you have to consider how people are going to respond to it. This is why e.g. the DMCA takedown process is widely abused. Do corporations have to execute obviously invalid takedown requests? Maybe not. Are most of them going to, when the consequence of doing it is harm to powerless third party individuals and the consequence of not doing it is potential liability for the corporation? Yup.
- realo 11mo agoSo... I ask Gemini to write a technical spec and Claude Code to implement it? Basically a week-end project...
- Teever 11mo agoEverything old is new again. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeCSS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeCSS It worked out pretty okay for DVD Jon but I imagine it was a little scary for his dad and brother at the time.
- orthoxerox 11mo agoI used to remember the lyrics to the 09 F9 song.
- calgoo 11mo agoSounds like a good job for all that AI power that is being used for BS. I wonder if we could all crowd source a driver, 100s of claude and google gemini subscriptions working towards breaking the standard and releasing 100s of different implementations that does the same.
- therein 11mo agoYeah right, 100s of Claude and Gemini subscriptions towards breaking the standard... That's how things are done. Not just one guy with a good reverse engineering skillset. What if you crowd sourced not 100s but 1000s of Claude subscriptions. That's where the power is. You just give them a task and they just finish it for you. That's how things are done now. Hard problem? Throw 50000s Claude subscriptions and it will kneel in front of you. Unstoppable. 50000s Claude subscriptions not enough, throw 10000000 subscriptions at it and problem solved. That's how it all works, we know this is the way to do things. Everybody knows you take a problem and throw more Claudes at it and that's it. For example, we can do anything we want, we just need more Claude subscriptions. I couldn't do something the other day, the problem is I didn't have enough Claudes. We just need an order of magnitude more Claude subscriptions to figure out cold fusion and unify general relativity with quantum interpretation of the world. Can you imagine what 10E10 Claude subscriptions would do with that problem? Problem stands no chance. It is so annoying people think this is future, that this is analysis. Despicable.
- anthk 11mo agoWhat would you expect from z'ers growing up under closed magical shells doing everything for themselves (smartphone and tablet OSes) and later being utterly lost with the basics of IT.
- cubefox 11mo agoGreat, now my face hurts from laughing.
- charcircuit 11mo agoI think you misread the comment. Each person's AI agent breaks the standard once. He was not claiming they would work together. And even if he the act of translating and understanding large sums of text (binary data) seems easier to divide and concor than open ended problems like cold fusion or unifying quantum physics and general relativity.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- pipo234 11mo agoI suppose you could do a clean room reimplantation, but I doubt you could advertise it as HDMI 2.1 compliant without legal repercussions.
- littlestymaar 11mo agoOn what basis? Trademark infringement?
- pipo234 11mo agoYes, that. I think you're only allowed to claim support/compliance if you're certified. And that, allegedly, means they run a couple of closed source tests and involves paperwork and NDAs.
- pdimitar 11mo agoWhat would the legal repercussions be against an anonymous coder who donated the code to multiple code forges? Action against the code forges themselves? I mean, not like they would be able to find the guy.
- stronglikedan 11mo agoThat's why you advertise it as HDMI 2.1 compatible instead. I believe there's precedence that allows that.
- pipo234 11mo agoYes, that might work. Strictly, HDMI is a registered trademark that might have strings but you could always say something like EIA/CEA-861... compatible instead
- adgjlsfhk1 11mo agotrademark doesn't cover descriptive language. saying it is an HDMI port is trademarked. Saying it is compatible with HDMI cables and displays is a purely descriptive statement.
- MBCook 11mo agoIt wouldn’t be HDMI 2.1 because it couldn’t be certified. And if you claimed it was 2.1 I imagine they would sue you. Could it actually be made? I kind of wonder that. Like if one of the things you have to do is claim to the other device that you’re 2.1 would that get you in trouble? Or if you just advertise all the features and they each work is that good enough?
- bluGill 11mo agogenerally if something is needed for interoperability the courts only accept patents as a way to protected it (patents have a limited lifespan). However the law gets really complex and you need a lawyer for legal advice.
- baby_souffle 11mo agoI think in this case you still couldn't claim it was certified. It would be on users to discover that if they plug an HDMI capable screen into that HDMI shaped port on your widget device, things just work and video shows up as expected
- bluGill 11mo agoNote that if the protocol itself only works if the device claims certification you may be able to claim certification in the protocol. However you couldn't claim certification in marketing or any other context except where things wouldn't work if you were not certified.
- tedivm 11mo agoThey could just say "we believe we're compliant with HDMI 2.1 but are not officially certified". No lies, no claims they can't make, and nothing I can see that would introduce legal risk to folks unless there's some patent encumbered garbage in the spec.
- MBCook 11mo agoRight. I would just advertise the features not the version number. My only concern there is the protocol stuff I mentioned.