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Barcode Maker Responds After Forcing Drivers Offline
The following was sent in by Doug Davis from Digital Convergance. Plain text is his. Bold text is mine.
Digital:Convergence understands this Linux issue and the concerns expressed by the community. Had Digital:Convergence been approached by developers we would have been (and still will be) happy to work with them in a constructive direction. Instead, our products were reversed engineered and what has occurred is a public display of what is clearly our intellectual property. It is unfortunate the supporters of the open source community have taken steps to publicize intellectually property in-order to further their own goals and desires. Unfortunately, for us all, some of the people conducting these efforts would not voluntarily remove our IP, even after being contacted.
Thank god. These folks worked hard to write code to use this piece of hardware, and it would be unfortunate if they were forced to take it down. Imagine if Linus had been forced by Intel to take down kernel versions that used their intellectual property in the early part of the last decade. A lot of companies have bullied a lot of people in the last couple of years, and it's only getting worse. Your CueCat, like DeCSS, is going to redefine what IP is. Personally, I hope that when I get a barcode reader, or a DVD-ROM drive (or a car, or phone, or any other physical thing), that I'm allowed to rip it apart and tinker with it at my discretion. I think that's my right as a consumer.
In the strictest legal terms we had no choice but to proceed protect our interests. By posting our IP to the Net the Linux Community has forced us into a position of having to legally defend our technology . Under IP law if we don't PROTECT our IP, we loose any remedies under law to PROTECT our IP. This IS NOT ABOUT stopping hackers, but trying to get the "hackers" and such to WORK WITH US AND NOT EXPOSE US and destroy over 5 years of hard work by a group of "geeks, hackers and techno-whizzes" like each of you!
IP is a weird beast. If you don't defend it, you don't have it. I imagine if Adaptec or Matrox defended the IP created by the work of their "geeks, hackers and techno-wizzes" by forcing Linux driver writers to take down code utilizing their SCSI controllers, hard drives and video cards, their IP would also be unusable under Linux. Which is too bad because I use hardware that they created every day. Oh, and 5 years of development for "base64+XOR"?
Any professional and serious developer will understand the following: .........Unfortunately the Linux Community could of inadvertently created the WINDOW for the BIG companies to come in and control and profit from this process we have created. So if M$ or some other company decides to do what you are doing *for profit" and DigitalConvergence allows the open source group to continue with out proper licenses, DigitalConvergence could loose its ability to effectively stop them. The Linux Community would of actually had a DIRECT HAND in creating what it stands most vehemently against!
You start it off by saying "Any serious Professional will understand" which is a none-too-subtle way of saying, "If you're smart, you'll understand." Fortunately you don't say that any serious developer will agree. What you're saying is that the Linux community should happily take down the code out of fear of some big company (mentioning Microsoft is poor form: it screams like a bad political commercial where they mention a bunch of scary things just to make their ideas seem more true). If big scary Microsoft came along and released their own distribution, there is nothing we could do about it (provided that they played by the common rules of the GPL). That reality constantly exists, but that doesn't slow anyone down. It's not the point. If Microsoft wants to play by the rules of the GPL, I say let 'em. But by your logic, nobody should ever write and distribute source code, for fear that Microsoft would take it. That strikes me as a bit backwards.
It is our hope the Linux community will help us in our efforts by
- working with us to create a product to support your needs, and;
- stop and remove illegal posting efforts, and;
- encourage others in the Linux community to work with us
hand-in-hand to develop a various solutions and useful applications.
You too, can be part of this valuable tool and project!"
The weird thing about open source development is that code gets written where programmers itch. I bet you'll find support for #1, but less so for #2. See, your itches might not be the same as their itches. We all define valuable tools and projects differently, and our needs might be a bit different then yours. I don't think that folks posting this code constitutes "an illegal posting effort" any more then I think posting a driver for a scanner does.
Digital:Convergence supports the Linux/Unix community and plans to make a version of its software available for Linux available in the near future. Also, licenses are available for any developers wishing to work with any aspect of our technology. We welcome the individuals of the community to contact us and use a more professional, orderly and productive manner in adjusting our products to better serve, in tact and based fully upon our various Patents and Intellectual Property, your community, . Professional Licenses and Development contracts are available to the Linux/Unix community and we welcome your direct and professional contact.
If I own a Ford, do I need a Ford wrench to fiddle with my engine? If I buy a frame, do I need a nail & hammer from the same company in order to hang a picture on my wall? If your tools are the best tools, and at the right price, then by all means, I'd happily use your nail & hammer, but we live in a marketplace where competition drives everything, and you have competition. You have the advantage: you have the technical specifications and the most developed tools, wheras the open source guys are groping blindly in the dark looking for answers. Oddly enough this groping is a large part of the fun. It's a challenge.
And, by the way, the AT HOME - PERSONAL USE DEVELOPER LICENSE is $20 USD! So please, HELP US PROTECT, what a group of talented developers, have worked so very hard on for over the last 5 years!
J. Jovan Philyaw - Chairman & C.E.O. ceo@digitalconvergence.com
Doug Davis - President Technology Group ddavis@digitalconvergence.comI seriously wish you guys the best of luck, and hope you figure out a way to work with the developers who are writing this cool code. If you haven't alienated the developers, I bet they would be happy to work with you. My fear is that your business model is shaky: you've given away zillions of barcode readers, (no doubt at great expense) but failed to realize that they, like iOpeners and TiVos and Furbys and AIBOs and DVD-ROM drives and everything else physical, can (and will!) be ripped apart and played with by people. You're trying to use lawyers to take away people's rights to screw around with their own hardware, and that's a problem... your service strikes me as being about a lot more then a silly little barcode scanner and what people do with it. If your software serves a need, people will use it. If some hacker finds some cool other use for the hardware, maybe people will use their code too. This is very real, but this is a free country where we can tear apart our toys and rebuild them if we want.
On a practical note, you have a website and a net service. Thats different. Thats not a physical piece of hardware that someone can hold in their hands. You should focus on that, and not waste your energy going after hackers who are just poking around with a cool piece of hardware. I'm not a business guy, so I don't know what the answers are, but I do know a dead end when I see it. And don't forget that the percentage of people who are actually gonna mess with this stuff is very tiny. You should concentrate on making your services better for the huge majority of your users who don't run Linux, and wouldn't run software other then yours even if it did exist. It's the blinking 12:00 syndrome. Most users just don't change the defaults.
I'd also like to say something to the readers: don't get angry and attack these guys. They're just a group of guys trying to feed their dogs by coming up with ideas to make a buck. Yelling and screaming doesn't help anyone. It's easy to forget that every company is just a group of people trying to accomplish something; they aren't evil, even when they make mistakes or do things that we disagree with. But don't stop writing the code. I can think of many uses for this barcode scanner (like maybe software to index my DVDs?). It's still legal to reverse engineer, and that sure better never change.
What Intellectual property?
I support this business model. Free trials are a great way to get people to use a product and maybe later, pay for it.
What I object to are laws that say people have a right to make money on this sort of stuff.
You mention Sony and the PS2... They sell a PS2 at a loss hoping the license fees for games make up for it. A valid business model imho.
But, what about someone who decides they don't like the PS2? Sony is out a bit of money if the person buys the system and gets the default game, plays it once and tosses it in a box, never to buy more PS2 games. Should the law mandate purchase of at least twelve games?
What if I buy a PS2 and play games on it, thus satisfying Sony's business model, but would also like to run Linux on it. Do they have a right to say I can't?
If they're concerned, they should sell the system *and* twelve games, or whatever they need to break even, as a unit, or with a clearly written contract requiring the purchase of these games by a certain date. Unfortunately, few people would be willing to spend the $800 or so that this would cost on a system they may not like, so Sony would sell few units.
Instead, they gamble. If the PS2 is good, the games will rock and people will buy them. If the PS2 sucks, nobody will buy them and they'll lose money.
I would have been willing, had DC asked politely, without threats and lies (yes, provable lies) to makre sure any CueCat software I wrote would *by default* communicate with their servers, if used in a network mode. That is, if the user scanned something and wanted to look it up, the default server would be theirs, changeable to Amazon(etc) only if the user wished. Instead they lie and threaten, telling us any unquthorized use is against the contract (this is fraud on their part) and demand we don't use the product in any way they disagree with. This is where I stop supporting them in any way.
Instead of them having a reasonable business which I would support, and hobby usage as well, they try for 100% of the pie instead of 99.9% and lose my support and the support of almost everyone else.
It's not their business model, it's them. They're lying, threatening, assholes commiting fraud and I'll take any and all actions I can to see them bankrupt in a short a time as I can manage.
Step 1: Flood their service with repetitive and automated scans and created serial numbers.
Step 2: Reveal this to their potential customers, dropping the value of their data to zero.
Maybe the next group of people to try this business model will realize that fraud and lies aren't going to help them, those people I will support.
Hey wait,
Taco deserves the freedom to Editorialize as he wishes on his web page. I am happy he did it. I enjoyed reading it. I think it was well written and complete.
Enough of this Politically Corect, lets not ruffle any feathers crap.
When we have no rights left (they were sold to corporations by our duly elected reps in congress and executive offices) we will be dreaming of opportunities such as this where we can defend our rights.
BTW: The business model of this product (I picked up one from Radio Shack on Thursday) implies that they are recording the data and selling it without the users permission (or was it hidden in the shrink wrap). I think their model is flawed. Just like I think the Grocery chains model of holding us ransome for 'preferred savings cards' panel id card is flawed.
Adults are obsolete children. - Dr. Seuss
Perhaps some definition of the term "clean room" is in order. A clean room implementation is one in which the hardware is treated as a black box, and then software is written to imitate its behavior under ever conceivable circumstance. The classic example of this was the Compaq reverse engineering of the original IBM PC BIOS. It would have been trivial for Compaq simply to slurp the BIOS off the EEPROM and make copies onto their own chips. That would be stealing, and not OK.
What they did instead was to give the BIOS to engineers who has not seen the assembler code on the chip and instruct them to duplicate it based on its behavior. So they sent various signals to the chip, and watched what it did as it booted up, and basically systematically looked at precisely what it was doing. They were then, with some trial and error, able to write code that duplicated all the observable behavior of the IBM BIOS. That is a cleanroom implementation, as evidenced by the fact that Compaq came out with a fine clone of the BIOS and was legally allowed to sell it. Mere use of the hardware is not enough to make it not a clean implementation
The CueCat reverse engineering is remarkably similar to this, except much more simple. The hackers merely had to figure out what the output meant, which apparently was pretty easy. They treated the CueCat as a black box, recording the output from the scanner and figuring out what it meant. No harm, no foul.
Walt
Even if Microsoft programmers are as incompotent as people at slashdot paint them from time to time (and I know they aren't), I doubt that it would take more than a day for them to reverse engineer the protocol.
Current US laws allow for reverse engineering to effect interoperability. Nothing more than that was engaged in here.
Finally, I think they are just a bunch of crybabies out to give opensource a bad name. Look how much whining they did. Look how unspecific they were about what IP was allegedly stolen. My guess is that they lost sales of some development kit or another, or fear such loss, and are using the IP argument to scare people into not blabbing.
Reading through the letter, it becomes obvious that these folks don't know what Intellectual Property is. Intellectual Property law takes on three main forms: Trade Secrecy Law, Patent Law, and Copyright Law.
Anyone taking apart their barcode reader and creating software from what they see isn't violating Trade Secrecy law, because reverse-engineering is permitted under Trade Secrecy law. It doesn't fall under Patent law unless they have a patent that hasn't yet been mentioned (this would have to be a patent on the software, because that's what's being recreated), and it doesn't fall under Copyright law unless folks are actually using code from the barcode reader's software or ROM, or producing a work heavily derived from them.
It is a company's sad obligation to go after everyone who is violating one of these IP laws, lest they lose protection under the law, but it's a sadder 'obligation' for a company to use FUD (even when they're apologizing at the same time), under the guise of protecting legal rights, to try to dissuade people who have every right to do what they're doing.
The question here is whether D:C knows it has no legal footing, but is ding everything it can to get people to stop anyhow, or if they read too much slashdot and think 'that's our intellectual property! We must defend it!' without knowing the ramifications of IP law.
Kevin Fox
Kevin Fox
The best part was that the store was having a sale -- buy a microwave, get a free home microwave inspection (where a guy would come out and test your oven for RF leaks). Of course Josh had the guy come out and test the microwave AFTER he had taken it apart and used it to make his standing-wave-generator. The guy was scared shitless but tested the apparatus anyhow.
My point is that your example is a particularly cogent one about using a product in a manner for which it's not intened.
Ever use a car as a nutcracker? You jack up a drive wheel, put it in fourth and put a brick on the gas. Then you throw nuts into the gap between the wheel and the ground. Works VERY WELL with fresh walnuts.
Ever use a stereo as a degausser? You short a speaker line through a long spool of wire, ram a bunch of iron things into the center of the spool, and use the volume knob to degauss.
Ever use a Craftsman screwdriver in a way for which it wasn't intended? Did you break it?
Using products in ways in which they weren't intended is a big part of the American ideal. If the Wright Brothers hadn't used bicycle parts in a way for which they SERIOUSLY weren't intended, it might take a lot longer to get to that ski vacation today...
Thomas claimed that the protocol is IP. I think that's false. Even if it were, the actual embodiment of "the protocol" is not one specific string of bits that it spits out (no more than an image generated by a Adobe Photoshop is the IP of Adobe), but rather the set of rules for generating that string of bits, namely the logic/code stored in the CueCat and in the driver on the computer.
Additionally, if this were the case, I think they'd have to have a patent on the rules for the protocol. Otherwise, the rules for the protocol were independantly figured out, which is a legal way to get the information under trade secrets law.
--
OK, let's see here:
- So many CAPITAL LETTERS whenever he's REALLY CONCERNED that you DON'T GET HIS POINT. The guy reads like Robert McElwaine. You know, "UN-altered REPRODUCTION and DISSEMINATION of this
IMPORTANT Information is ENCOURAGED."
Well, ACTUALLY, in this CASE, this guy's DIS-couraging it, but MY BASIC POINT is the SAME!-
Abysmal English skills. This guy's a CEO?
Finally, and most seriously, a complete failure to grasp the concept of IP. Nowhere in his rambling spiel does he actually articulate to what "property" he makes claims of ownership.- "reversed engineered"?
- "intellectually property"?
- "we loose any remedies"?
- "the Linux Community could of inadvertently" Could OF?
This in just two paragraphs. Jesus H. Christ, I've seen kids in grade school with better English skills. Call FuckedCompany now!- "if we don't PROTECT our IP, we loose any remedies under law to PROTECT our IP"
The rest of the screed is more of the same. Incoherent rants about how a geek with a few lines of Perl is a dire threat to their entire business model and a furtherance of the Micros~1 monopoly. Yeah, and flying monkeys might come out of my butt. (Oh, wait a minute... that's what started this!)No, you dipsticks, that's trademark law. If I create something called the CueCat (without the dippy colon in front of the "C"), and it's a plastic cat-shaped barcode thingy, and he doesn't sue me, he stands to lose the right to use the word ":CueCat" to describe his plastic cat-shaped barcode thingy.
Netpliance (with the I-Opener and the resulting arms race of BIOS upgrades and anti-hack measures they wasted time with) missed the clue train, but at least can claim they faced a genuine threat. And even they didn't try to sue anyone.
But these guys, good Lord, they haven't just missed the Cluetrain, they aren't even at the friggin' station!
In closing, I'm pretty sure think there's more than one reason the "threatening letter" was merely a vaguely-threatening letter and not a real cease-and-desist.
1) As flamed ad infinitum on /. last week, any case against the developers of :CueCat(tm)-related hacks is likely to be extremely weak.
2) If Digital Convergence doesn't even have proofreaders, what the fuck are they using for corporate counsel?
3) And on that corporate counsel, if they do have corporate counsel, could one of them kindly bitchslap their management team and explain the difference between trademark law and "whatever the ring-tailed rambling fuck" (that's waht I'm calling it, because they've utterly failed to explain it - again) they're trying to use as grounds to sue an open-source developer with a funny domain name?
Yes, but they don't have a legal leg to stand on. Nobody is misusing their intellectual property by using their hardware. Intellectual property would be a patent on barcoding, but they don't have one. Intellectual property would be a copyright, but I can use their hardware without breaking the shrink-wrap on their copyrighted software.
They should feel free to ask us not to use their hardware, but when they try to force us not to, I refuse to cooperate with their impolite request.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Commander,
Whilst I can appreciate your desire to rip to shreds some of the specious arguments presented in this letter, I would humbly suggest in future that you refrain from doing so. The first law of public posting is that someone else always has a smarter angle on the whole thing than you do, so if you act in a restrained manner and don't rip into the offender, someone else will.
Or, to put it simply, next time just post the original letter and invite comments. This way, the Slashdot hordes (ranging from rabid to rapier-witted) can do the barking for you, whilst you can maintain a modicum of disinterested independence.
Please consider.
Regards,
TFBW
Copyright? On this post? I think not.
Their argument is that they don't think anyone should have the right to publish their IP without permission. I don't think they would care if you reverse engineered their :CuteKitty and kept it to yourself. (In fact they would probably never even find out about it.) In this context, your microwave example makes no sense to me.
I personally started to reverse engineer their toy the moment I found out that it would spit out plain barcode text. Luckily I found out someone had already done it and it saved me the trouble. Now I can use the ":Cat" for all sorts of things on all sorts of platforms.
To those who published the code: Thanks!
To DigitalConvergence: What your beef? How does this ruin you business model? It seems to me that your little toy just became orders of magnitude more useful. Not only can I use it with your software (when I'm in Windows), but I can use it for whatever else my little geek brain dreams up. Back off and let the popularity of your device soar.
That is all.
-Derek
Their business model is one I support, and one that I could see growing quite quickly - the one where you give people some physical thing that ties them to the service that pays for it. I don't think that it's a bad business model - but it needs legal protection because it would be very easy to destroy it.
No business has the right to anyone's money. If some company chooses to give away some widget because they think that you can't use it without paying for their service, that's a gamble.
As we all know, not every gamble pays off. There should be no additional legal protection for those who choose a risky business model. Intel wasn't able to stop AMD and Cyrix from using MMX, even though intel claimed that it was something that was necessary to protect their business.
It's like their renting you the device, not giving it to you - the price of the rental is that you pay them for it's use.
No, they're giving it away. If they wanted to rent it, then fine let them rent it. The way things stand they are giving it away. It becomes YOUR scanner, if you wanted to, you could drop it off a cliff or run it over with your car, it is YOURS.
I don't think it's your right to destroy their business.
They don't have any RIGHT to have their business model succeed. They bet on the wrong horse, tough luck for them.
Sure, the device isn't their business, but it's a vital (and vulnerable) part.
A chain is only as strong as it's weakest link, so too is a business plan. If they made a bad assumption about how the devices could be used, then that is their fault and their problem. As long as nobody stole and code from them, there is nothing questionable here.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
I called in a favor this weekend and asked an attorney to look at the issue. For obvious reasons, they don't want to be identified (but I can go so far as to say that this particular attorney likes imported beer. Good thing I do too!)
Anyway, the opinion is that no illegal activity has taken place. According to posted descriptions, the re-engineering activity which occured took place within permitted boundaries of US law. Furthermore, posting of the re-engineered driver to the Internet and use of the driver by persons who have NOT clicked agreement with their contract, is perfectly legal. In addition, if someone mailed you the device unsolicited or if Radio Shack gave you the device without telling you that it was on loan AND if you did not click to agree with their contract, the widget is yours for permissable use within US copyright and patent law. You can't rip it apart to find out how it works and then start cranking out clones, but that's just about the only thing you can't do with it. Specifically, using a different software driver which avoids reference to their site and/or usage tracking technology, is perfectly legal. If they wanted to bind users to a contract dictating terms of usage, they didn't do it properly and unless you click on the "Agree" button on their contract, no usage contract exists.
Have fun!
PS: The commenting interspersed with their reply letter disturbs me. It looks like heckling, for which I have no respect. Please, next time just present the response and comment on it afterward. Please don't abuse the forum. mjs
From: Bruce Ide
4 8211&mode=thread)
3 GkDScRwqFQCfaZTH
To: ceo@digitalconvergence.com
CC: ddavis@digitalconvergence.com
CC: ontheweb@usatoday.com
CC: malda@slashdot.org
Subject: Cuecat Reverse Engineering Effort
Date: Tue, 5 Sep 2000 10:02:33 -0600 (MDT)
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1
Gentlemen,
Reading the letter to the community
(http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/09/05/05
regarding the reverse engineering of the Cuecat barcode reader, I
have a few comments which I would like to convey at this point.
First, the right to reverse engineer a product for interoperability
purposes has legal precedent which has been upheld by the courts on
several occasions (Sony vs. Connectix being the latest one that I am
aware of.) Had I had anything to do with the development of the
drivers in question, I would currently be initiating my own legal
proceedings requesting a summary judgment stating that I am in no way
infringing on the Digital Convergence IP. After receiving that (And I
WOULD win, given previous legal precedents.) I would then follow up
with a harassment lawsuit requesting damages sufficient to give any
other company attempting this tactic pause. In this case, I had
nothing to do with the development of the drivers in question but I
hope my suggestion has made its way back to the original developers
and that they take it under consideration.
Second, the IP laws as originally designed were intended to stimulate
innovation and protect small inventors. They are currently being used
by large corporations to prevent innovation and intimidate small
inventors. Had the legal landscape been similar to this a decade ago,
Linux would never have been created because each computer would have
shipped with a license stating that you could only use it in the way
the hardware company intended, with the copy of Windows that came with
it being your only choice. Undoubtedly were you to desire to upgrade
your software, you would have had to have bought a new computer. This
is clearly not what our founding fathers intended when they created
the IP laws.
Third, if we, the community, do not stand up to large corporations
when they attempt to use these tactics to intimidate us into silence,
we will lose what rights we have to use the hardware we bought and
paid for in the manner of our choosing. Computing as a hobby will
cease to be, and the best and the brightest programmers in the field
will go elsewhere, leaving only mediocre writers of mediocre software
in a mediocre field with none of the growth that you may have noticed
over the past decade. That's not good for the community and it's not
good for the companies which serve the community of which Digital
Convergence is one.
Fourth, given the above, I must question both the ethics and the
intelligence of a company which does not realize the above. Truly,
alienating a potential customer base is not a good way to do
business. I take the same stand with any company using these tactics
to spread fear and intimidation in the community: I will never buy
your products. I will never recommend your products in any project I
work on. I will never work for your company. In a managerial position,
I will never hire as an employee anyone who worked in your company
after these tactics came to light. I will encourage all of my friends
to take a similar stance. You have plenty of competitors. I shall
patronize them.
Thank you for your time.
- --
Bruce Ide bruce.ide@echostar.com
http://www.paratheoanametamystikhood.net
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I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
This guy is confused. Trademarks and patents have to be defended. Copyright does not. He's talking as if they were the same thing. He needs to sit down and have a good talk (and listen!) with his lawyer.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Why they think that some third party developing a compatible driver is a violation of their IP. Does this mean that Ford, GM and Chrysler could sue Haynes and Chilton for publishing manuals on the repair of the vehicles?
In order to publish such a manual, one has to "reverse engineer" the car in question. Haynes even brags that every manual is "based on a complete teardown and rebuild" of the car that it's for.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
I'd also like to say something to the readers: don't get angry and attack these guys. They're just a group of guys trying to feed their dogs by coming up with ideas to make a buck.
Their dogs are attack dogs, better known in certain circles as lawyers.
Their explanation is pure bullshit, starting with the fact that it is only for trademarks that the principle "defend it or lose it" is valid. Besides, what exactly intellectual property they are trying to defend from hackers? They are wonderfully vague on this point and the reason is that what they'd like to defend is not legally defensible. And spare me these sob-sister stories about five years of sleepless nights. There is nothing technologically interesting in their toy. They came up with a business plan which, as usual, didn't survive contact with reality. Film at 11.
I don't like guys whose knee-jerk reaction is to send threatening but legally meaningless letters.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
It already has legal protection; they simply chose not to use it.
The legal protection is contract law. Make the customer sign a contract that explicitly states what is required by the customer, states what uses are permitted, and states that using their product in conjunction with competitor's products is prohibited.
Digital Convergance, the companies that sell DVD movies, the makers of the iOpener, and countless other businesses won't do this, of course, because they don't want the customer to be aware of the terms prior to the sale. They know that people will refuse if they know what they are getting into. Well, that's dishonest and deceptive, and I won't fucking tolerate it.
(Another reason they won't put these contracts up front is that there are anti-trust laws against it. But I would favor the repeal of these anti-trust laws if consumers were informed up-front about their (lack of) rights. Buy a DVD, sign an agreement that you will only play it on a DVDCCA-licensed player. Take a free CueCat, sign an agreement that you will send everything that you scan to their server, along with the CueCat's serial number which was also scanned at Radio Shack and linked to your name and address. Buy Microsoft Windows, sign an agreement that you will only run Microsoft apps on it. Make these ridiculous "agreements" explicit and let the market embrace them (*snicker*) or wipe them out. And if there's no contract, then there's no restrictions beyond the "default" restrictions state by, for example, copyright law.)
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
...has nothing to do with IP or any other crap like that.
It seems pretty clear to me that this company is all about collecting personal information about you. Now, we're used to companies like Doubleclick et al. using various schemes to figure out where you browse, and generate models of your on-line behaviors automatically. But the CueCat thing is designed so that they can find out about things in the real world, too. They WANT you to scan things in your house (books, products, magazines, TV shows, etc), and when you do, their software does a quick lookup for you, and gives you the shovelware connected to whatever it is.
But it ALSO remembers who scanned what, and they can generate a much more impressive profile of you as a consumer: what do you watch, what magazines are you reading, what books do you have, etc. And I'll bet that THAT's what their business model is all about---more invasive consumer profiling.
And THAT's why they can't tolerate the Linux drivers which don't do the lookup through their servers---because they don't let them form that profile. They've probably calculated their (hugely expensive) giveaway scheme to give a particular rate of data generation through their servers, and if they don't get that, then their business model is shot to hell. Of COURSE they're going to try to prevent people from getting around their software: every person using the Linux driver is the same as a reader thrown away to them. So I'm sure that if a developer tried to work with them, they'd spend a lot of effort urging them to direct all connections through the Digital Convergance servers.
My father-in-law gave me his reader (which some magazine helpfully mailed him), and I was going to use it under Linux, but I've changed my mind. If I want a barcode reader, I'll go buy one that's free of this kind of crap.
Happy Premise #3: Even though I feel like I might ignite, I probably won't.
A bar code reader with obfuscated output no harder to figure out than a secret decoder ring? THAT's IP these days? Fine, I claim uuencoded rot14 encoded text to be my increadibly earth shatteringly important, gen-U-Ine rocket science type intellectual property.
More seriously, bar code readers are NOT any sort of rocket science these days. There's really nothing worth protecting as far as reading the output goes. Knowing how to read it's output doesn't tell anyone anything about the reader that they couldn't easily guess with 100% accuracy without even looking at the thing. The less information that is available about communicating with hardware, the less valuable it is.
As for the free source helping MS out, the fact that they have programmers capable of making Windows even get through the boot process tells me that they could SURELY have figured the simple obfuscator out with no help from the Open Source/GPL community. It's REALLY that simple. I even said to my wife a few days ago that something like that would be GREAT for a High School or edvanced elementery school math class. It's challenging enough but attainable for students at that level. (I'm not a teacher, It was just an idle morning coffee sort of thought).
By referring to that as valuable IP, Mr. Davis is effectively wandering around at an international grand master's chess competition talking about the mind numbingly complex strategies and logic involved in Tic-Tac-Toe. The funny sound in the background is raucous laughter.
but trying to get the "hackers" and such to WORK WITH US AND NOT EXPOSE US and destroy over 5 years of hard work by a group of "geeks, hackers and techno-whizzes" like each of you!
Small hint: sending a nastygram from a horde of lawyers is NOT a good way to open that dialog. Some people have found that 'Can we sit down and discuss this' is a lot meor effective than 'Listen here palley or we bust your kneecaps'
There IS SOME innovative thinking going on with the CueCat. Having a server that allows the user to scan catalog barcodes and be taken to the product page is possably a good idea. I would suggest working to protect that rather than the simply obfuscated standard hardware. The real objective is to have the consumers out there using the CueCat and Digital Convergance servers to scan catalog items. Make sure that those servers are reliable and their databases are extensive. Perhaps even add additional information that's otherwise hard to find. Make sure that when a retailer wants that feature for their catalog that they sign up with Digital Convergance for that service. So what if a few geeks use the CueCat as a general purpose barcode reader, as long as they use your server when they want to look up an item in a catalog!
A final point, I realise that Radio Shack is not the geek haven it once was, but REALLY! Of all of the retailers to work with SURELY Radio Shack was one of the MOST LIKELY ones to have customers who could and would figure it out and further, consider doing so a moral imperitive as well as a fun way to waste an hour or two on the weekend! If you show off your cool new car at an auto mechanics convention, expect the hood to be raised!
(Yes, I worked at DCNV from day one until late last year).
It's not just the barcode scanning that went into the development of this product. There is also an audio-cue portion to this technology which was much more difficult to come up with effectively.
There was also the fact that we had whole racks of machines that were configured differently to test various sound cards, barcode readers, Windows versions, audio cables, etc. We did months and months of live testing from satellite feeds and on-air broadcasts using the audio technology.
Not to mention the upper management doing the dog-and-pony in countless conference rooms across the country. It really was a 5 year process. I know I spent several months on the back-end mod_perl that would handle just the proto-type testing. The C code came after I left...
In any company, starting from scratch takes awhile. Especially when you have a TV show to run, etc. It was a long hard road... Still is. (Just not for me anymore, although I still feel intimately acquainted with DigitalConvergence's ideals and plans. I still see the "vision").
I don't know if it's totally clear but what that PR rep had to say is a complete work of fiction. There's literally no truth in it. Let me count the ways:
... or lose it" they're lying.
... or lose it".
-- nothing done with the Cuecat was illegal
-- there's no IP for the Cuecat people to defend - identify it! I dare you! "By posting our IP to the net" my ass!
-- there's no such thing as "Defend it or lose it" under IP law. If 200 people rip off MS Windows and MS prosecutes 2 of them, there's no such defense as "Well, your honor, MS didn't prosecute the other 198 people..." This is a MASSIVE LIE made up by companies who want to shift responsibility. ANYTIME you see a company say "We had to
-- That whole third paragraph about the linux community helping Microsoft is hogwash.
-- there aren't any illegal posting efforts
-- if it took them five years to develop a BARCODE SCANNER which MUNGES the normal output in a trivial manner before outputting it, I am a Great Horned Antelope. I'm not? Well then I guess they're lying again. I talked to a friend of mine at Symbol, and Digital Convergance approached them to make this device earlier this year. (Symbol didn't end up making it.) Their company has been in existence less than one year. Symbol could make a run of these for you in a few months.
And what I really hate is that the lies are so pervasive that they end up shaping the whole debate. People can only see past a certain limited number of lies at a time. So they'll catch a few, but then they'll accept the bigger lies like "We had to
Random thought to any company executives who happen to be reading this: you know, if you truly wanted [your company] to be a radical, different company, try this on for size. Fire any and all PR people. Just fire them. Don't hire any more. Ever. If there's a story where you have to talk to the press, let one of the principals do it - the guy who programmed that feature, or whatever. No matter how big the company gets, DON'T EMPLOY TRAINED LIARS TO DEFEND IT. Because that's what a PR person is - someone trained in the art of creating believable lies day in and day out. People catch on to this, believe it or not, even though it's a very slippery thing to catch on to, and they end up with (at a minimum) a vague distrust of that company, because they know they're being lied to but can't quite figure out exactly where. It's the reason Microsoft has such a bad reputation. If VA or Red Hat or anyone else truly wanted to break the mold, they would abandon the institutionalized lying. This would prevent that distrust from building, as well as keeping the company on the straight and narrow - without a wall of lying to protect them, the company execs get good feedback whenever they're doing something wrong.
I think the first company to do this has the potential of being a very different, much more
people-friendly company than we've seen in the past.
--
Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org
Under IP law if we don't PROTECT our IP, we loose any remedies under law to PROTECT our IP.
I challenge any attorney out there to support this with case law. I have consulted with IP attorneys on this very matter and have been told that, except for trademarks, this is totally false. IANAL, so I could be wrong, but I doubt it. If you ARE a lawyer, and I'm wrong, please point to freely-available references justifying your opinion.
Given that the above-quoted statement is false, we have two (and ONLY two) choices.
1. Doug Davis is STUPID.
a. He is NAL, and he either makes statements about legal principles without consulting AL, or he consults STUPID L and believes them.
b. He is AL and should know better.
2. Doug Davis is a LIAR. He knows what he says is wrong, and says it anyway.
Again, if I'm wrong about my premise, please correct me in this forum.
They don't get to trample on our rights to explore technical problems and discuss our solutions, in order to feed their dogs. Their threatening legal tactics are no different than those of the MPAA in the DeCSS case. The fact that they're a small company is no excuse - indeed, it means that every person there holds more responsibility for the actions of the company, not less.
Note the vauge references to "intellectual property". What do they mean? Was copyright violated? Was a patent broken? Was a trademark violated? Taking something apart to see how it works, and describing your findings to others, is not a violation of any legitimate law. (The DMCA is illegitmate and unconstitutional, and its architects and supporters need to be cleansed via the flaying and boiling ritual described above.) Oh, and to my knowledge (IANAL) only trademarks need to be defended with vigor to be recognized; patent and copyright holders can be more lenient and still retain their legal rights.
So: fsck 'em if they can't take a hack.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
---- ----
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Ok, this is the reason Digital Convergence is upset. DC makes their money selling codes at about $50/each to advertisers in different media. The consumer sees an ad, swipes the code. The driver software sends the code request to a MySQL database that interprets the code into a URL, after intercepting the user's unique ID code.
The reason DC is able to make money is not because they can move you to the site easily with the bar code scanner, it's because they can autmatically track the demographics of users who swipe codes.
DC has set up a completely seperate company called Digital Demographics to handle this. This is where the money really is.
Homegrown drivers that don't require the user to sign up and let their demographic pants down would obviously scare DC.
Also, the DC codes system is proprietary. The CueCats can read normal bar codes, but only CueCats can read DC codes. Figure it out for yourself.
1. Each device has a unique serial number. You can see this number spit out with the perl decoder available on the net. (I will not post link, for fear of having author harassed) This RISK needs no explanation.
2. Their database depends on customer contributions, just like CDDB does. They clearly state that the submissions become the sole property of them. (In case you were thinking about polluting the database in protest, as I did, it appears that the submissions are queued up and reviewed by humans.)
I'm also annoyed that the damned device has no off switch or a cover for the scanner LED. My computer desk now gives off an eerie red glow at night unless I cover up the ugly cat-shaped device.
Still, I can't see they have any hope of defending this. AFAIK, there are no patents on the absurd encoding scheme they use. They gave away the hardware (I will not be bound by a shrink-wrap click/through license on hardware!). And now now they're bitching that someone can potentially built a better mouse trap.
I'm not angry with this company, really. It's more like pity for dreaming up such a poor business model. I hope the employees are looking for other jobs, as these folks won't be around much longer, IMHO.