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Nikon Responds to Encryption Claims
ader writes "In a rare response to public complaints, Nikon has released a statement clarifying the use of encrypted white balance information in the NEF raw data from its digital cameras. They point out that this 'proprietary' format is accessible through the use of their 'proprietary' SDK, which is freely available to 'bona fide software companies' on written application. In other words: open source coders can butt out."
I'm so glad I bought a Canon Digital Rebel.
Nikon can go f**k themselves with a telephone pole. Sideways.
Honestly, if they refuse to let photographers have open access to their OWN PROPERTY (photos), I'll continue to support one of their competitors that will.
I just hope Canon doesn't try to pull this shit too. I love being able to use gimp+dcraw to tweak my photos.
Freakin' morons.
-Z
Um. Maybe there's a language-barrier problem here.
Nikon has File Format X. Along with File Format X comes Software Kit Y.
Guy says, "I don't want Software Kit Y, because Nikon refuses to give me permission to change it, give it away, tell other people they can give it away, whatever." He says this with much righteous indignation.
Nikon has both property and moral rights over their software. (In Europe, the moral rights are protected explicitly by law. In short, an author can decide who can and can't have a copy of his work. In the US, this is implied by all our laws, so we've never made it explicit.)
Guy is asking Nikon to waive all their property and moral rights. Why? Because he just wants them to, I guess.
Which is why I asked my question. I was hoping somebody could explain it to me in terms that don't boil down to "Gimme gimme gimme!"
Of course a format is property. They thought it up, they defined the specfication. Their property.
While I totally respect that you think it ought not be that way, there's simply no way to get from here to there that doesn't involve basically abolishing a whole class of property rights. There are countries in the world where that sort of thing could be done legally, but just FYI the United States is not one of them. Any such law that sought to just plain abolish ownership rights would be struck down as unconstitutional whether it be passed at the state or federal level.
My nikon camera (I own a D100 and a coolpix 5700) is my property, not nikon.
Right. (Nikon, being a proper name, should be capitalized, by the way.)
If I want to take a little bit of driver code that they provide it, and debug it, fix it to work on 64 bit, or just audit it for security, I should be able to do so.
Wrong. You bought the camera. You did not buy the rights to computer software that interfaces with the camera. They're two different things. Just like when you buy a DVD, you don't get the rights to the movie contained on it.
If the drivers were freely available, and people could write new and interesting software based on it
First of all, we're not talking about a driver here. We're talking about the computer code necessary to read and write a particular file format.
Secondly, Nikon's customers don't want new and interesting software for their cameras. They want to depress the shutter and get photos out. They can do that now, admirably, with the software Nikon already provides.
If, that is, they're on a Nikon-supported software platform.
Nikon ships software for Windows and the Mac. Nobody, statistically speaking, uses anything else.
Go to hell.
Such language. You should be ashamed.
That sounds like a consumer specifying what they want from a product and expressing why they aren't happy with a particular option.
Read it again. The "consumer" -- remember, we're talking about somebody here who never in a zillion years would buy one of these two cameras, so the term "consumer" has to be used very loosely -- is asking Nikon to sign over the perpetual rights of their property. It's tantamount to asking Nikon for the deed to their corporate headquarters. It's absurd, patently absurd.