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The End of the Free PCI Device List (Update)
imann writes "For many years, Jim Boemler was the maintainer of a free PCI device table which reference all the PCI ID's of PCI Devices. This service is used by Free Operating Systems for keeping up to date their pci device list. That was a very usefull service for us (i was working in a Linux distro in the hardware suport team). It was wonderfull until the PCI-SIG had their lawyers cease and desisted him to stop this service because of the use of the PCI logo AND name ! You don't have the right to use the three letters P,C,I ! Incredible... So he was forced to close his website.
This is a incredible loss for the hardware support in the Free Software world. I hope PCI-SIG will change its position !
Please support Jim." A friend emailed me to point out that many /.ers have been emailing the wrong person to complain....read on for details...
Jamal wrote, "The story you posted is causing us a headache. Our CTO, Alan Deikman is being bombarded by emails from people reading that story.
Alan is not the person in charge of the PCI SIG, his only sin is that Znyx
did host the PCI sig in the early 90s and he was the list maintainer. This
was a gracious act and should not be rewarded the way it is now. Infact he is
trying to help the gent with that website to see if things get resolved." Alan's email was posted on the page we linked to, erroneously.
And why do my posts start at 1 all of a sudden. The worlds gone mad, and I never noticed.....
A lot of users (like me) buy hardware often. If a device doesn't have official support for Linux, I am less likely to buy it... If the kernel doesn't even recognize it... well, they aren't gonna be selling me one.
I can't see how this group is going to come out ahead by doing this. The small amount of money the y (might) take in selling the information is going to be dramatically offset by the much larger amount of money their sponsors/patrons lose in sales.
Just change every instance of 'PCI' on the webpage and documentation to 'Peripheral Component Interconnect' with the first letter of each word much larger than the others.
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
I thought you were only prohibited from publishing a company name/logo if it was used for profit? Was he making a profit?
It never ceases to amaze me how easily technology organizations shoot themselves in the foot. Let's punish the developer community making our standards-based hardware more valuable!
That also begs a question - does trademark allow you to prevent use of a word totally or just for marketing purposes. I seem to remember from school that suing someone claiming their product was "a PCI card" that wasn't licensed to do so is one thing, but saying "this card works in PCI bus systems" is quite another... and not actionalble.
-- $G
The trademark was granted only three months ago. It states on it that first use was Dec '94.
Does it really take eight years to file a trademark, or does this seem more like something they did specifically so they could sue other people? Maybe this guy is just the poor test case. Try it on him and if it works, go for a bigger fish...
(Score: -1, Stupid)
In the true slashdot tradition, I did not read the article, however:
* PCI is kind of like "kleenex"; It's a common-place word that is used to describe something, usually not a company or organization. If I recall correctly, there was a legal ruling about pretty much this same situation, the plantif being Kleenex. The court did not rule in Kleenex's favor.
* If we really want to get nitty-gritty about it, couldn't he just replace every instance of "PCI" in his site with "Peripheral Component Interconnect bus", thus (all be it wordy) technically describing the DEVICE, and not using the "trademarked PCI name"?
* How does this fall under the "please don't buy our hardware dept."??? It doesn't seem that PCI-SIG even SELLS hardware.
If you look at the PCI-SIG home page you'll see a little animation mentioning that "Board members are members of the following companies...".
Guess who shows up at the top of the list when you follow the link?
Chair
Tony Pierce
Microsoft Corporation
Well. That explains a lot.
This article needs to be on a few more websites,
I'd say change the name and thumb your nose at them... this is too valuable a service to lose to some copyright holder and their nitpicking attorneys.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
Other possible names:
- "PC* Device List" (UN*X-style)
- "PCl Device List" (it's a lower-case L, not an upper-case I!)
- "Personal Computer Interface card device list"
- use an image of the connector (surely *some* company would love a bit of free advertising for one of their cards)
- "[censored] Device List" (Feynman-style)
All,
Notice some thing really intersting Micro$oft and puppets have their hand in the operations of PCI-SIG.
Now I shall ask, do you think that it benifits them to cause problems to the developers of ALL Free/Open operating systems out there that run on PC hardware?
Granted IBM, HP and Intel probably can provide access to that list for its own developrs, but what about the idependent developers that made Linux, FreeBSD and such great in the first place.
Wouldn't this be easily resolved by removing the logo and renaming the site to something like "rot13-CPV"? Or perhaps "List of IDs for The Device Standard Which Must Not Be Named", to appeal to the Lovecraftian crowd.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
1. I think someone else was behind pushing the group to target Jim's site. Some groups of people would love nothing more than to hurt the open source community. Insert name of your favourite illegal monopoly here.
2. I think Jim over-reacted. Perhaps he didn't realise quite how much not only the PCI group, but free sotware developers depended on his list. In computing, there really is no room for wounded pride.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
To: Alan.Deikman@znyx.com
Cc: mcohen@schwabe.com
Subject: I can't believe you guys shut down the free PCI device table!!!
I can't believe you guys shut down the free PCI device table!!! I'm flabbergasted. I can't think of any possible reason you would do this. Don't you have anything else better to do than close down an extrememly helpful website? The webmaster spent thousands of dollars out of his own pocket for the love of a product. The owners of that product now thank him for 6 years of work by kicking him in the proverbial nuts? We all know it was just a guy helping other guys out, and that he had no relation to your company. What exactly do you have to gain from this? What do you lose by having more systems support your architecture? This makes zero sense. He helped people to use your technology. He pushed your technology! He was free advertisement. And all the time he has been doing this, we have thought of you as one of the FEW, RARE consortiums that were not COMPLETELY out of touch with your users. Well, now we can see that you are. You are only interested in money, and you view all your clients as potential thiefs, and potential defendants. Yesterday you were an example, but today, you're just a statistic. You're just another consumer-crushing entity. Instead of a group that people look to for help, you've become a power-, money-, and blood-thirsty group that people fear because you have no respect for them, their interests, or their rights; only your bottom line. Well, time to push you from the small stack of reputable groups on the right, to the huge, towering pile of examples of immoral societal plagues on the left.
It was nice while it lasted.
Kurt
PCI is what it is. Compare this to automobiles. If you were keeping track of all the automobiles and who made them and some Authoritative They said that 'automobile' and 'car' and any derivative word (like 'auto') were disallowed, what would you call your list? The Mechanized Driving Thingy List? Who would find it?
Send your friends messages of love at fuck-you.org
If only it were so simple. All motherboards, even highly integrated ones, use PCI for their interconnects. Your sound card (chip) is on the PCI bus even if its not plugged into a socket. The only things that aren't on the PCI bus are the ones plugged into the northbridge, because northbridges talk to their southbridge via PCI much of the time.
I think the nForce and maybe some of the Intel stuff is an exception.
That said I am letting them know I'm unhappy and will be avoiding PCI whenever possible.
Wanna read the letter I sent? I sent this to: Alan.Deikman@znyx.com
Here. Copy freely. Might wanna change the personal details, but the overall theme is I think quite good:
[blockquote]
This is in response to the Cease & Desist sent to Jim Boelmer, maintainer of the PCI Device ID list located at http://www.yourvote.com/pci/. I'm sure your mailbox is full of mail like this today, so I'll be brief.
I have used Jim Boemler's PCI Device List in the past. In fact I have even contributed to it. I feel that it's existance does not infringe on the PCI trademark, and in fact helps PCI_SIG's brand by providing support for PCI devices in free and open operating systems.
I feel that Cease & Desist letters are dirty and underhanded, and are not the way that a responsible corporate citizen chooses to begin conflict resolution. While ethical, C&Ds are certainly not moral, and do not contribute to the universal good, except in the case where other avenues have been explored first. I believe this case is particularly evil because Mr. Boemler has contacted PCI-SIG in the past about this matter (hosting the PCI device list), and not received any response.
I am a computer consultant at a fairly large company. We specialize in systems management, e-business, and e-branding. I'm sure, in view of your already wonderfully moral way of handling matters, that you'll forgive me if I don't tell you which one. As a result of the matter with Mr. Boemler I will now be strongly advising my friends, family, associates, and clients to avoid the use of PCI devices whenever possible, and will be recommending alternate serial and bus interconnect technologies. I would do the same with my customers if I thought it appropriate. I will also recommend that anyone who does not purchase a PCI device as a result of this writes to the device manufacturer, expressing their concern with the PCI-SIG group, and advising that the device would have been purchased if it were available in another technology.
I strongly urge the PCI-SIG to seek amicable resolution in this matter with Mr. Boemler. This would convince me that PCI-SIG is not so evil that devices using PCI technology or logos should not be used by anyone, ever.
I would like to see the free PCI device list come back into being because, as I said, I believe it to be beneficial to every party involved.
[/blockquote]
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
It's just about corporate stupidity and pride. Some suit found the website and went crazy, no business plan, no money to be made, it's just about pride, envy and stupidity. And by the way, what else has PCI-SIG to do except surfing the web all day long and bragging about how great they are?
For a better understanding look here, large organizations really work that way.
PCI-SGI may be stupid, but they are not so stupid to really believe they can make serious money on selling such a service.
Perhaps this has absolutely nothing to do with anything, but the PCI-SIG Board of Directors is chaired by Tony Pierce of . . . Microsoft! According to this CNet story he is (or was) technical evangelist for Microsoft's Hardware Strategy Group. Good strategy.
But, I DO think it's a "prisoner's dilemma" for them too. Maybe they couldn't know that Jim would have acted in good-faith if they had just sent a gentle warning. So, they erred on the side of going to the lawyers. That's their right. It is their trademark.
The question now is: who's gonna be the bigger man on this? Jim could take the high road and say, "allright, you could have been nicer saying it, but let's work together on this," and help establish trust.
Nothing is so smiple that it can't get screwed up.
You really have to dig on the PCI-SIG site to find the three words, Peripheral Component Interconnect. It's conspicuously absent from the front page. Those are probably too generic to defend, if it stood for something really wierd and logically unrelated like Papaya Canola Interface then it would be more defensible.
For example, you can't trademark Wrench brand wrenches, you CAN trademark Wrench brand apples.
The three letters are easier to defend as a trademark if they're just three letters, not if they stand for something related.
(That's a tough one though, there's alot of action over three letter trademarks right now.)
Either way, three letters are pretty generic, so they probably CAN'T get you on that, strictly speaking, but they're bigger and have more money, and he who has the gold makes the rules, so therefore, they can.
I'm not an expert, but I do play one on TV.
The way to adjust your "friends'" behavior is not to hire a lawyer.
Sure, the logo usage might have been questionable, but that was only half the C&D's "proposal". Discontinuing use of the word/phrase/letters PCI? How is it at all reasonable to hire a lawyer to send a D&C about that?
They have his email. They obviously have his snail mail. They probably have his phone number, too. If they'd have sent a quick 'hey, Legal is fussing about you using the logo' he'd have taken it off. No need to be complete raging assholes about it. Why continue the 'friendship'?
I've had people steal from my sites before (Purity Test) - never maliciously. Just an 'oops' or a lack of understanding of what they should be doing. A quick note fixes everything. If someone ever said 'piss of jerk', believe me - my girlfriend's a lawyer - I would make their life uncomfortable. But that would be last resort.
If it's a question of legality, why not have a lawyer look at your email or whatever? No need to have the cronies doing it outright.
Send your friends messages of love at fuck-you.org
If we called it a Piece of Crap Interconnect, we'd all still know what we were talking about. Then just lose their logo and replace it with a picture of some turds sitting in card slots of a motherboard. Now you're legal, and if you're not legal, you're protected because your site is satire/political speech. End of problem.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Unfortunanlty, when dealing with something like this there has to be a paper trail. SO if they just call him up, and somehow it turns into a big issue they could find themselves in a position where they shot them selves in the foot. Is it right that they lawyers need to get involved and draft a legal letter, no. However it's what they NEED to do for legal reasons. The way I understand this, he was offering a great service, they had a small problem with some of the format he presented the info, they come to him in a legal way to try and get this resolved (nicely) and he desides to shut down his service. Why is he shutting down? Sounds to me like he's shutting down out of spite. Now that's a good response, punish everyone else because your ego got bruised becasue someone else did something the proper way. I know, SOMEONE is gunna feel the need to modify this a flamebait, and if that's how it goes fine. The point i'm trying to make (which is not flame bait) is that there doesn't appeard to be any LOGICAL reason for this service to go away, it just needs a few changes which would probbly take almost no real time to make.
As always, Google saves the day. Someone save this list, and throw it on Kazaa.
Now PCI-SIG has to go after Google, and Kazaa, and 1000's of Linux users. Someone keep updating the list, pass it around. Don't let it die.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
[Deformated after /. reported: "Your comment has too few characters per line (currently 34.5)" A STUPID RESTRICTION! Make the box wider & tell us how many chars/line is kosher, damn it!]
;-)
I don't want to insult a person who's built & paid for a useful web-based service...
But I -do- want people to show a bit more "chutzpah" in matters like this
Anybody remember the Boston Tea Party?
It was in response to a dumb tax on tea, on the part of remote tax-collectors, & now it is gone.
More recently, Australians won a license-free "Citizens Band" - simply by -not- getting license, en masse.
(And, by all reports, Auusies, tend to be pretty compliant ex-^H^H^H colonists of the UK
Now, that bit of Civil Disobedience was against government, not the threat of legal action,
so there are differences.
But, surely, we can expect better support & a cleaner result than to just "roll over & die" that this site got.
Perhaps the same kind of response as we might expect, eg when a bug is detected in some Open Source software, would be appropriate; or, why not a:
LERT - Legal Emergency Response Team
1. Volunteer-based (might need to be anonymous)
2. Archive of succesful -response- HowTo's
(a bit like Bennett's play-by-play story of how he got Toshiba to refund $$$ for his non-use of (& non-intent to use) a bundled Microsoft operating
system;
while not a response to a Cease & Desist letter, it was a response to a legal quandry)
3. If necessary, off-shore (ie where legal)mirroring of alegedly "offending" site
It might be nice if such sites were as portable & easy to implement/mirror as possible.
4. IF the site's owner plans to take down
(& not just relabel bits of) the site,
then - for God's sake! - give the com-
munity NOTICE & perhaps (in advance)
an easy way to download its content;
even an udatable snapshot is more use-
ful than a total loss of access to it
5. A team of legal experts (volunteers)
stands ready to advise the site owner
(perhaps under safe disclaimer agreements,
if applicable) on how the letter or
other inputs (from IP owner(s)) might
be interpretted & replied to.
6. Fundraisers generate some $'s for
legal defense (again, if necessary)
etc.
It just doesn't work to walk away from
the fight. Sometimes changing a web page
into one where the icon for, say PIC-SIG,
as in this case, becomes a hot-link to it
& adding a CLEAR disclaimer ("UNOFFICIAL
PCI diveice list" or whateverm nect to it)
would be enough of a response (especially
as a pre-emptive strike, at site-creation)
to enable the site's continued existence.
Is it about showing off some cool new way
to store & provide info... or a way to
provide info support to the Open Source
community.
If it's the lattter, a searchable text-file
might suffice... one that anybody can
download, upload & share later.
If it's the former, then we're shooting
ourselves in the foot & aren't helping
each other as much as we might IMO.
Sometimes I'm amazed at the amount of ignorance that passes for "interesting" or "insightful" - particularly when it is neither interesting nor insightful. 1. To play the game you need to know the rules. So far this discussion is like watching a chess where everyone is standing around arguing about whether castling is legal. 2. You don't play with someone else's toys unless they give you permission. This applies to Intellectual property as well as everything else. He is using their registered trademark without their permission. 3. If PCI-SIG didn't defend its trademark, they would loose it. If you don't enforce against everyone, you can't enforce against anyone. 4. It's the trademark, stupid! Kill the infringing trademark usage and the problem goes away. Yes, you can still use PCI - you just can't use that cute fancy logo that doesn't appear on your keyboard. Letters on the keyboard are font issues. 5. Get a Life! This is NOT a reason to kick anyone - down or up. If the gentleman chooses to close or maintain his site - it is still his still and his decision. Sounds like he's spent a lot of time providing a valuable service to our community and he should be thanked and commended for it. We should be helping him find out how to keep his work going - not whining about how unfair life is. ... Thanks!
Here is what I sent to the lawyer; others might consider taking these actions that I outlined...
Sirs-
Having just read about the Cease and Desist order sent to the above mentioned site, I find it appaling that a non-profit organization would not attempt to resolve the issues more amicably with the site owner.
While you do represent them and ultimately must execute their orders, please pass the following onto your client:
1. Non-profit organizations have typically benefited greatly from such individual efforts to support and inform people. You have significantly closed off a major legitimate source of such information. Unless your organization wishes to maitain such a list for the hobbyist/OSS users, your group has, as I have so eloquently summed things up to management before, "Put a shotgun to your head and started pulling the trigger to see if it works".
2. If the primary reason for the C&D order was the use of the logo, you could have given him a different logo or special permission (with a link to your organization) to use it and created exceptional good will while maintaining suitable copyrights and logo/standards protection.
3. If your organization were a for-profit company, I would be far less interested in this. But a standards organization? Are you going to go after publications which use the abbreviation PCI for your bus architecture next?
As to consequences, I am going to pursue the following:
A. Since I have some influence in buying decisions, I will start having staff investigate choosing bus architectures other than PCI for systems. I won't claim a big success here, but I expect others will also start looking for alternatives.
B. I shall make my Congressional Representatives (House and Senate) aware of this situation and ask them to investigate the matter, especially as it relates to infringing on First Amendment rights and rights of non-profit organizations.
C. I shall ask the IRS to consider reviewing the tax-exempt status of the organization (also through my Congressional Representatives); if they are resorting to actions such as this, I have to think something monopolistic is going on and may require further investigation.
D. I shall advise my technical peers in the Internet of this situation and ask them to have their companies who are members of the organization ask for a better resolution of the matter.
E. I shall post this e-mail and any responses from you or your represented organization on www.slashdot.org for the readership to review and act upon.
I am very disappointed that such an event occurred; I certainly hope that your firm did try and dissuade them from this step and pursue other alternatives. If so, I (and the slashdot community) would like to know that.
Please feel free to e-mail me at this address...
Supreme Granter of Doctor of Obviology Letters ("A FIRM Command of the Obvious")
http://www.pcisig.com/feedback
I'd suggest (IANAL) that he simply remove any copies of the PCI logo and put up a disclaimer that he has absolutely no affiliation with the PCI-SIG group other than the fact that they tried to shut down his website and hi-jack the database from him.
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
Or something like that
My debut novel AMITY now available: http://jeremydbrooks.c
I mean they got some lawyers out there to protect their IP. When lawyers find something that looks fishy, they send a C&D. They don't usually escalate it to a PR rep. (usually the two are just about the only ones that can make "official" statements on behalf of the company) so that he can take a friendly chat. It's not the first, nor the last time lawyers will send a C&D to anything even remotely similar.
If he thinks PCI-SIG (except for the legal branch) has anything against his site, I think he's mistaken. Probably they didn't know about the whole fuzz before they read about it in their inbox or on Slashdot. And while he might have had his site up for ages, and done a lot of good for PCI, that does not matter to a lawyer that sees a violation. And legally, there probably was one. The letters PCI hardly have any copyright, but the logo definately does and I don't see how fair use applies here. I think a lawyer that promoted himself to be judge by letting good sites "slide" would be out of a job pretty quick.
I can see how he's hurt but this isn't very different from fansites for movies / bands / cartoons / whatever that's been asked to stop using copyrighted stuff. I'm sorry, but I don't really see what justifies going overboard like this...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Don't copy it, but feel free to make similar points. My take on this is this is probably a young, inexperienced lawyer who thought it was big and cool to go in with all guns blazing, and is now (I suspect) desperately trying to dig himself out of the shit. If, on the other hand, PCI-SIG actually instructed him to write in these terms, they deserve everything they get.
Dear Michael Cohen
I appreciate that you're probably getting a lot of grief from strangers today, and probably feel bewildered and a little hurt. You probably feel that you were just doing your job, and that people (including me) are just shooting the messenger.
That's true, of course, to a degree. But in this case it isn't an adequate excuse. Yes, as a lawyer, your job is, in the end, to do what your client instructs. But when your client instructs you to do something extraordinarily foolish and liable to cause grave damage to your clients' own interests, part of a responsible lawyers duty is to councel caution and reflection.
Your clients members are, as a consequence of your action, denied access to a data resource which is vital to them. To replace this resource, which you have by your action denied to them, will cost them many thousands of dollars, delay development of new devices, and cause untold confusion. At the same time, their goodwill and reputation among the technical community on which they depend is in tatters. What possible benefit did you see to your client, and how do you propose that they should go about repairing the damage that has been caused?
After a letter as unnecessarily offensive and aggressive as that which is posted here http://www.yourvote.com/pci/Scanned_.pdf over your signature, saying sorry is not likely to be enough. This isn't a matter of ego, virility, and big swinging dicks. It's a community where people provide resources out of good will and a spirit of co-operation, and you cannot simply go rampaging about in your elephant boots. You (and your clients) have a very great deal of humble pie to eat.
Yours Sincerely
Simon Brooke
Chief Technical Officer, Scaffie Ltd.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
I notice that Tony Pierce of MS is on the Board at PCI-SIG. You may wnat to point out that their Knowledge base article q298837 points customers to www.yourvote.com/pci in order to ID unknown devices. I wrote the article and KNOW for a fact it is used daily be MS support techs while assisting customers.
~Z
I would think the best place to send the letters is to the PCI manufacturers (and presumably members of PCI-SIG0, especially the ones who actively support FreeOSs and any who reference the database from their site. PCI-SIG are going to crawl back down if their members tell them to, but if a few thousand (or even 50000) people they can write off as a minority group mail bomb them for a few days then they are not going to be too inclined to change based on these facts. As others have pointed out this database isn't a tool for Joe Public so the targetting of our letters has to be to the people who will see the benfit to their own pockets for this site to remain in existance.
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
Jim, I read the cease-and-desist order, as well as the rant which has replaced the former site. And, well, all I can say is, don't you think you're overreacting???
As far as I can tell, PCI-SIG objects to the use of "PCI-SIG" and their logo, both of which seem to be reasonable objections on their part. Your site is NOT actually connected with theirs, after all.
So why not simply remove those two items and keep this list up? It almost sounds to me like you were tired of doing it, and this was just a convenient excuse.
As far as the letters "PCI" go, it is naive to believe that PCI-SIG can enforce the use or non-use of those letters in any way, shape or form. There are more than sufficient legal precedents which parallel how this mark has become a household word - and even if that were not the case, a simple addition of the appropriate R/C/SM/TM symbol, possibly with a footnote disclaimer, should more than cover the issue.
So all in all I must be missing something, as I just don't see what the big deal is all about.
If you're not living on the edge, you're just taking up space!