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Autodesk Suing to Keep Format Closed
An anonymous reader writes "AutoCAD is by far the industry standard CAD tool for engineering drawings. When I was an engineering student it was on every computer in the college of engineering. Autodesk, the makers of the AutoCAD software, are attempting to quash an effort to reverse-engineer the proprietary binary format used by AutoCAD. Looking at the court order, their whole argument revolves around something called TrustedDWG that basically looks like a digital signature that verifies the file was created by an Autodesk product."
All Autodesk had to do was join the Open Design Alliance, and they could use the ODA libraries without restriction. Instead, they filed suit.
Don't forget to read The Autodesk File for more insights into how the once-revered company became just another soulless money hole.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
For those who have never done CAD:
:)
AutoCAD is a 2D drawing tool with functions optimized for the production of scale drawings. It is an extension of the old T-Square And Pencil technique into the computer; a sort of Adobe Illustrator tuned to drafting.
It is very, very good at this, and I found it (given that I had a little old skool drafting experience) fairly easy to adapt to.
But at its core, you're still projecting 3D objects into 2D or psudo 3D (orthometric projections) using the draftsman's brain as the projection device.
Enter Solidworks.
Solidworks is a parametric 3D modeling package. You create the object in 3D, and then the software generates your 2D drawings from it. No more construction lines. No more mismatched views.
There have been 3D modelers before (VariCAD for Linux isn't bad) but Solidworks takes it a step farther - it remembers every step in the construction of an object, and every step is tunable. Where past 3D modelers used Boolean operations to construct their shapes - but then the shape was fixed - Solidworks allows you to change the parameters of every operation at any time. Punch a hole through an object, but then discover it is the wrong size? No problem - just select the hole in the object's construction tree, and change its size.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg.
It has revolutionized mechanical drawing, to the point where it is inconceivable that I'd ever use AutoCAD ever again. Solidworks is one of the few software packages I've ever used that just left me dumbfounded in amazement at how powerful, easy, and intuitive it is.
And no, I don't work for them.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
"If you use AutoCAD and decide to move to another software, you either have to redraw all of your current drawings or do without them."
No, you don't. Most major CAD systems will import DWG files since they have paid the licensing fees to AutoDesk to include a utility to perform the import. It isn't always pretty, but the functionality exists.
I can only speak for my country, but AutoCAD is absoultely huge here in the architect business, at least on a national scale (Sweden), but I believe it's big throughout at least the rest of Scandinavia too, if not Europe. Over here, it's what MS Office is to Office applications, Apache to web servers. Not AutoCAD by itself though; maybe that's what you meant, but AutoCAD with various plugins depending if it's about architecture, industry and piping, HVAC, or something else.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
My father was chief architect for Royal Bank of Canada, when it had it's own architectural dept (wich they closed in the 90s). The department took the entire 7th floor of the Place Ville-Marie building in Montreal. It was a big department with lots of architects, engineers and dedicated drafting machinery like CalComps.
AutoCAD was the *only* thing they had internally. It was *very* big, and they had 3D extensions and bill management.
So, yes. Industry standard. Surpassed? Certainly with products such as Catia, but in the technical plan & drafting area, AutoCAD is still very big. Most small to medium architectural design firms still use it today.
There was a recent discussion about this case, and the central point was NOT that the open source group was reverse engineering documents. It was about the open software's representation of itself as a "genuine" file using the AutoCAD name. The equivalent to a ODT file containing the terminology "Genuine Microsoft Word file, guaranteed to work". I have my issues with Autodesk, but they aren't necessarily the evil ones here.
With the myraid tags and calls in the DWG format, any open source implementation, while well intentioned, is bound to miss a few and create problems. Ironically, the Autodesk Genuine tag was meant to assist interoperability by giving support staff a clue as to why a file might not open correctly. They weren't ever trying to stop the creation or use of DWG files by third party software, and it's likely in their best interests to keep it a de facto standard.
Dammit Otto, you have lupus.
The Lanham Act is the federal trademark code. What Autodesk is trying to argue is that anyone 'faking' their 'TrustedDWG' technology is violating their trademark. The best analogy I can think of is GM saying you can only put 'genuine GM' parts in their cars. Of course, it is a lot more complex than that here, and judges aren't known for their technological savvy. The keystone of trademark law, though, is how likely something is to confuse the consumer. In other words, for Autodesk to win they will have to show that consumers are likely to confuse this imitation 'TrustedDWG' for the real thing; i.e., that since it's a .dwg file, it must have been made/come from Autodesk.
Not sure what I think of their chances. On the one hand, AutoCAD is so ubiquitous that anyone that has any need for CAD probably automatically associates .dwg files with AutoCAD. On the other hand, well . . . who gives a shit? It'd be like MS claiming trademark in .doc files -- sure, everyone knows .doc files = Word, but it's something that's below the radar. It's not like you go into a store to buy a .doc or .dwg file, and might be confused about it's source.
It's been a while since I've looked at the Lanham Act, but I think Autodesk would have to prove some sort of damage, even if they were able to show likelihood of confusion.
The bigotry of the nonbeliever is for me nearly as funny as the bigotry of the believer. - Albert Einstein
Blech. At least as late as Microstation 98, it was a button driven piece of trash. Our drafters needed two monitors. One for the drawing and one for the ocean of palettes required to do the drafting. Call me a luddite if you must, but a CLI/keyboard interface will always be faster for Drafting than a GUI/palette driven one. The tools need to change too fast to waste time zipping the mouse around the screen.
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I am the IT Director for a county, I can tell you that AutoCAD is used heavily outside of teaching. Not only does our Highway Department use it exclusively for designing civil engineering projects such as roads and bridges, but the State Department of Transport also uses it for nearly every aspect of their projects. I have several friends who work in many different aspects of design and engineering from CNC work to design prototyping for medical devices. Surprise! They all use CAD products from Autodesk.
Most of the posts here seem to be stating that AutoCAD isn't the "standard" because
it isn't the leader in the arena of 3D design.
AutoCAD is _not_ the standard for 3D design. I'm not sure it ever was...
Autodesk competes in that arena with their Inventor product - but I don't think
that they are anywhere near the market leader. It's a pretty fragmented market.
However, I believe the AutoCAD _is_ the standard for 2D architectural drawing.
This is the arena where architects (or, rather, the draftsman working for an architect)
draw the 2D drawings. Buildings, landscapes, etc.
It may be that Autodesk has some new version of DWG which is closed, but older versions have been open for many years, as well as DXF. Google on the words autocad compatible, and you'll see it.
IntelliCAD, the most prominent AutoCAD-compatible code base, is still being worked on, and there are new versions of it which are very low in cost, and at least one which is donation-ware. There are quite a large number of companies developing this code-base now. I'm certain that other products are easier to use, but you can still do truly excellent 3D work using the modern AutoCAD-type GUI and its venerable command-line system, and industry compatibility is tremendously high. And because of the command-line system, its scriptability is excellent.
J.E.B.
Joshua Corps
So far as I am aware, no company has EVER succeeded in blocking other people from reverse engineering their file format.
.doc, .xls, .ppt, Project or other file formats. This is why AutoDESK is fighting so hard to keep .DWG closed. Switching to another program, including training your entire user base, is child's play compared to making sure that mountain of existing files you have can still be read and used.
Enter the DMCA, stage right-wing. AutoDESK added basic encryption to the file format starting with AutoCAD 2004. Now, instead of just reverse engineering the protocol, you would have to decrypt it as well. This is now, in the U.S., against the law except for certain conditions. This one, interoperability, may well be one of the conditions, but that will be up to a judge.
And file formats are THE key. This is why Microsoft doesn't provide the full specs on
"Function A is under a different menu in OOo Writer than MS Word" and "This function doesn't seem to exist in OOo Calc" are trivial compared to "I can't read this document" and "My formulas don't work any more".
Lock those customers in tight enough, and they'll not only put up with getting screwed, they'll fight for your right to screw them as hard as you want.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Autodesk owns both Maya and 3DS Max, so I think it's a bit too early to say "good bye Autodesk". Perhaps they're not dominating the 3D CAD segment, but in principle the difference between a general 3D modeler and a CAD program is marginal.
Autodesk was a market leader and a real Silicon Valley 80s-90s wonder. One of the great things that came out of it, indirectly, was the book "The Hacker and the Ants" by Rudy Rucker which had some obvious inspiration from the time Rucker spent at Autodesk. The CEO at that time John Walker is a remarkable guy. As a bunch of people have already pointed out, they are long past market relevance (except for legacy lockin issues) so this is sad, but they were at one time quite the acme of geekdom.
I'm not sure either, and IANAL, but if I wanted to contest this I would probably cite Sega v. Accolade (Scroll down, copied text appears here:
Most of us know how that turned out - Accolade eventually won the right to continue to distribute their game cartridges. Sega went on to do the same kind of crap on the Dreamcast, but they weren't able to prevent clever programmers from putting a notice on the same screen that came up saying "licensed by sega" that says "no, it isn't, but this message has to be here".
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Yea, but they sued under the DMCA. These guys would have sued under the DMCA probably had it not been for that case. So they are trying a unique approach and calling it a trademark issue. By court standards the previous case would have little precedent on this one (though I'm sure it will be mentioned).
In the instances I've seen, you don't have to redo parts of the drawing or re-proof it. AutoCad seems to use some reference points that don't render when displaying in AutoCad but do show up in an import. They also show up if you save a DWG as a DXF and then import the DXF. The "import" probably does exactly that rather than try to go from DWG to whatever native format your CAD system is using.
Of course they WANT you to buy their stuff. The issue is the warning box for debugging and administration- even Autodesk wouldn't turn off functionality for non-genuine files.
Dammit Otto, you have lupus.
I know in North Carolina, there were specific rulings dealing with this, and the outcome ..
...
well damn, just go to Office Depot, they have an entire section dedicated to recycling and off-brand inks.
Ain't to hard to figure out what happened I guess
AIK
All a monopoly has to do is claim that their technical design is so recognized by consumers that they claim a trademark on it. Then it doesn't matter if the patent expired. Sure, the USPTO claims to not allow trademarks on patentable ideas, but it happens. The USPTO is just too overworked. Companies know this and force trademarks through anyways. Then one day you find out that a particular idea or standard is completely inaccessible to you forever.
Trademarks don't expire nor can they be revoked after they pass the 5yr no-contest period. They are much stronger than a patent and a common form of abuse now with big companies.
Did you know for example that the cylinder shape is irrevocably trademarked for certain products?
This probably sounds incredible to most people. Search the http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/gate.exe?f=searchss&sta te=qdqb5u.1.1 for trademark #75501874 (I have not found a way to link directly to a record in their database).
And this is just one of many examples. This and other reasons is why people are calling for IP reform.
peter
The only use of the signature is to control access to Autodesk files.
If that is what the court finds then the case will be immediately thrown out, because at that point it is no longer a trademark. The thing is that at this point there is NO RESTRICTION AT ALL on opening and using DWGs that lack the signature. From what I understand, the current version of AutoCAD puts up a warning box to nag you with some FUD around saying it isn't an "official" DWG file and it might crash the system. I think that is a bit over-the-top and I imagine most engineers and draftsmen will probably just scoff at it and disable the warnings.
If I was ruling on such a case (and I probably couldn't make such a ruling but I think it would be the fairest way of handling it) I would give this one to Autodesk, with the proviso that they have to send out a patch that disables the warning box by default (and to keep it disabled in all future Autodesk products) so as not to artificially influence the market for competitors. This would protect AutoCADs trademark and help the consumer with technical assistance if there are problems (AutoCAD support could tell the user to go File->properties or something, and if the drawing didn't have an Autodesk signature they could inform the user to contact customer support for the right product).
As someone who's been writing AutoCAD plugins using their API software many years... All the TrustedDWG thing does is basically tell the person opening a dwg in autocad that the file was last saved by a trusted dwg product (i.e. one using AutoDesk's software, or one of their own APIs). Consider it like having the right to slap the Windows XP Certified logo on your software. That's all it does. There's no encryption, no DRM stuff here... it just prints a string of text in the AutoCAD command window when you open the file. Is it right for some other company to claim to be AutoDesk? No. But why does Autodesk bother, you ask? The main concern for AutoCAD here is not that the OpenDesign (formerly OpenDWG) Alliance is reverse engineering their format. AutoDesk is partnered with several companies that use the OpenDesign API, and AutoDesk is well aware of them using it. Opening a dwg generated from the OpenDesign API, however, was marking files as being a Genuine AutoDesk product file, which guarantees that AutoDesk programs were the last programs to have saved the file. Aside from the point that people have been asking AutoDesk to open up the DWG format legally for years, there are some considerations here. Consider the issue of the OpenDesign API having a bug that corrupted the DWG files, in a subtle way that eventually caused problems in AutoDesk programs. AutoDesk shouldn't have to help companies with support agreements to solve it... they can just throw up their hands and say, sorry, but your file was not last saved by us... your other program corrupted this file, talk to them. Really it's only right. Would you expect MS to help you find the cause of formatting loss or file corruption on a word document that you had saved with OpenOffice? What's wrong with trademarking your files? It's not like they are saying it is illegal to use them any way you want to, nor that the OpenDesign Alliance must stop releasing the API... they just don't want another company claiming to be generating genuine AutoDesk files. Also worth noting here is that AutoDesk sells their own API to access dwg files without a copy of AutoCAD or AutoDesk Map installed... This API is currently called RealDWG (formerly known as DwgUnplugged). This is sold at a one time fee to a company with the right to make small applications or viewers for reselling. The fee for the license to make your own dwg format manipulating program is somewhere around $5000 last I heard... for a license to make your own software from the ground up, using their dwg access API and resell it. One last point... According to that site, the OpenDesign people have already released an update that no longer violates the AutoDesk trademark by claiming that their software was an AutoDesk product.
I hear you.
I work as the IS manager for a machine design an manufacturing firm.
It seems that our ACAD software sales person calls us more than any other of our distributors.
Our mechanical engineers have been converting over to SolidWorks because of it's ability to open and close drawings and save them back to the ACAD 2002 format.
I had received the 2005 and then 2007 upgrade and they sit on my desk collecting dust. I had attempted to upgrade twice now, and it broke half the drawings (2000 and before) and all of the plotstyles and seemed to forget every engineer's personal drafting preferences.
I promptly stopped the upgrade and left it alone for fear of bringing the entire design department to a screeching halt.
AutoCAD won't release their source because their GIANT cash cow will die.
Oh geeze, I completly forgot the preferences and plotstyle issues of upgrading.
/acad/support to /documents & settings/user name/acad/Acad vCrap/r16.0/enu/support - boy that was just great. Now instead of telling users "put it in your support folder" I get to explain how to turn on hidden directories, what a hidden directory is, what the documents & settings folder does, how it knows what their user name is, blah, blah, blah. Not to mention that I now can't just TYPE IN the directory anymore.
When they decided to move the preferences directory from
And why, in the name of Jesus Zombie Christ, did they remove express tools from the installation? Oh, it's on the CD, but I have to do it manually for every user the IT guy forgets to install it for. Oh, and we don't do batch plot anymore we call it publish now - which doesn't plot multiple sets anymore either and is pretty much useless. You can thank us by buying the latest version in 6 months.
Bah humbug.
My ACAD rep is also my plotter rep. I hear from that guy twice a month...
It would become an issue if the GM car could somehow detect the "Genuine GM" stamp on the part, and refuse to run if the stamp is not present. I think this is what AutoCAD is doing with their TrustedDWG, though I could be mistaken.
If that is what AutoCAD is trying to do, there is legal precedent in favor of the third party. In Sega vs. Accolade, Sega sued because Accolade was incorporating elements into their games that indicated to the Sega Genesis platform that the game was made by Sega. The court ruled that Accolade could do this, even though it might ordinarily be an infringement of Sega's copyrights and trademarks, because Sega had deliberately designed the Genesis platform such that it would not run any games without the elements in question. They observed that the use of those elements served no purpose other than to lock out competition.
Logitech's DOS mouse driver MOUSE.COM (dumped from an actual copy I've here) :
Also mentioned here by other
The Dreamcast boot code checks and runs only games that display "PRODUCED BY OR UNDER LICENSE FROM SEGA" in their Loader.
Opensource environment like KallistiOS feature a Loader that displays the required string on-sreen, and then adds an explanation that in fact, it's not under Sega's License, but that the string is required to the game to boot.
So the trick isn't urban legend and is genuinly used to circumvent such string checks, although I don't know if the trick was also used by PC BIOS cloners
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I'm confused; you replied to the GP's statment that "But no way in hell can AutoDesk deny interoperability with their file formats" with the following:
You went on to describe examples of ACCAD doing just this in practice. However, in the context of this thread, when the GP said "But no way in hell can AutoDesk deny interoperability with their file formats", I took it to be saying that AutoDesk could not successfully use the legal system to enforce this denial of interoperability. Of course they can technically deny interop. Wasn't the point that a technological item could have it's intellectual property protections weakened when it exists solely to lock out competition?
Pi Ran Out
Companies like VTech http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_128 were able to stay in the market with clean reverse-engineered ROMs.
That's why their trying to use Trademark law to attack these people. They're saying that in creating a new box that is openable by the key, you've voilated their trademark because the new box looks too much like their old one.