Interview with Alexander Noe, PxScan Developer

wikinerd writes "I interviewed Alexander Noe, developer of the open source PxScan and PxView utilities. He recently received a cease-and-desist letter by Shinano Kenshi, the Japanese company which controls Plextor. His utilities provide similar functionality with PlexTools, sending special command sequences to Plextor DVD recorders that activate special features such as media quality check."

Comments

The source

[MartijnH]

The original source of this story is this thread on the CD Freaks Plextor DVD Burner Forum. I guess the comments in that thread tell a lot about what long time customers of Plextor think at the moment.

An email?

[dougmc]

Alexander Noé: The letter itself is not explicitely marked as such, but I'm not sure if I have the right to publish an email sent to me in general without the sender agreeing on this.

Just recently I received an email from a lawyer in Nigera. Apparantly his client's father had died and left a large sum of money in a bank account. Apparantly they need my help to get the money ...

Seriously, serious legal threats usually don't arrive via email. Lawyers usually prefer to speak with certified letters and such, where they know it was received and who received it and when (and can prove it in court), and so in general anything received via email should be taken with a big grain of salt. Email is too unreliable (my spam filter ate it!) and just hasn't been around enough decades to make the legal system trust it. At most, they might send a certified letter and an email at the same time (and so the email will arrive first) but I suspect that even that's rare.

The email may be legitimate, and in this case it sounds like it probably is, but even so ... big grain of salt.

Re:Article Text

[Frank T. Lofaro Jr.]

Email cease and desists I don't believe have legal standing. I may be wrong, but the law often demands registered/certified postal mail (and for actually lawsuits, subpoenas, etc - physical service of papers).

Also, doesn't one have the right to make public any legal threat against oneself, like a C-and-D letter. Are those protected by copyright, or (likely) not, as they are functional not creative, and are a legal document (the law often favors legal documents being public) and in addition, one might want to make it public to defend themselves.

chillingeffects.org might be a good place to go.

I had bought a Plextor CD-RW a while back. It is the last Plextor product I will ever buy (*). I will convince other's to boycott also.

(*) Unless they repudiate their C-and-D letter, promise to never do that again, and release specs on all proprietary commands to the public without any license on those specs which restricts their use in free software.

Re:Artificial limitiations by companies never work

[hey!]

Your argument goes astray a bit because it only focuses on the producer and consumer without looking at the competition.

The existence of an open source application that jiggers the proprietary doohickeys on my device is potentially an useful aid to my competition. It may help them figure out may trade secrets, or to divine strategies equivalent to or better than the ones I use for my patented technologies.

It's not much help to my competitors; in practical terms it is indistinguishable from zero help. On the other hand the cost of sending a chest thumping C&D on official stationary to some private individual is practically indistinguishable from zero too.

So when in doubt, turn the crank on the lawyer box and spit out another C&D. It's cheap and risk free, and keeps your legal staff in practice for when you really need them.