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Interview with Alexander Noe, PxScan Developer

Posted by Hemos on from the good-information-to-have dept.

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."

3 of 128 comments (clear)

  1. Article Text by El+Neepo · · Score: 5, Informative

    It was already slow for me:

    The interview was completed through IRC chat. The whole text is released under a "verbatim copying" licence, so we encourage you to re-publish it if you wish (see the full licence at the end).

    Nikolaos S. Karastathis: Hello, please introduce yourself and briefly describe the utilities you developed.

    Alexander Noé: I'm Alexander Noé:, currently studying computer science at TU-Chemnitz. The utilities PxScan/PxView i've developed perform error scans on Plextor PX-712/716 and Plextor Premium drives. The tests are the same, but PlexTools had some handling I didn't like, for example you can run several tests on DVDs, but in PlexTools you couldn't trigger them at once, but rather had to trigger one test at one time. My goal was just to make all that more convenient.

    Nikolaos S. Karastathis: You received a letter via email about these utilities. Who sent the letter and what did it say?

    Alexander Noé: The letter was sent by lawyers working for Shinano Kenshi. The Lawyers claim those utilities would violate their clients rights.

    Nikolaos S. Karastathis: Have you replied to this letter?

    Alexander Noé: No, I haven't.

    Nikolaos S. Karastathis: Why do you think the lawyers sent this letter, and what are their requests?

    Alexander Noé: Plextor maybe sees me as competitor. However, they don't offer any Linux version, neither free nor for money, so I have absolutely no idea what their problem with pxlinux could possibly be. They demand that I cease-and-desist from any further infringements, and demand that I comply a list of all steps I've taken to ensure that their clients' rights will no longer be infringed.

    Nikolaos S. Karastathis: Have you contacted a professional lawyer yet? Did you receive any legal advice?

    Alexander Noé: A professional lawyer said that in his opinion, none of the accusations made by Shinano are justified.

    Nikolaos S. Karastathis: Is the letter confidential, can you post it for everyone to see?

    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.

    Nikolaos S. Karastathis: In the last years there are increasingly more legal problems for free/libre/open-source software projects. Now software patents may be introduced in Europe. What are your views on this issue?

    Alexander Noé: I *really* hope that software patents will not be introduced, but I can't do much about it... as I don't really understand lawyer and politician language, like most people, I can hardly assess the consequences software patents would cause, but it wouldn't make life of free developers easier.

    Have your say! Discuss in Wikinerds Forum (unregistered users are welcome).

    Nikolaos S. Karastathis: What do you plan to do now?

    Alexander Noé: I'm waiting what will happen....

    Nikolaos S. Karastathis: Anything more you want to say?

    Alexander Noé: Considering that Plextor did, not long ago, announce that they would be supporting open-source, I really wonder what all this is supposed to be about. Either they support open-source, or at least "tolerate" it, or they don't.

    Nikolaos S. Karastathis: The interview appears to be finished. Thank you very much!

    The text of this article is Copyright (C) 2005 by Alexander Noé and Nikolaos S. Karastathis. Verbatim copying and redistribution of the entire text of this article are permitted provided this notice is preserved and a reference to its original location is provided: http://portal.wikinerds.org/interview-alex-noe-200 5jun

  2. The source by MartijnH · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  3. An email? by dougmc · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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.