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Creative Backs Down on Vista Driver Debacle
In the wake of last week's driver debacle, Creative has finally decided to back down for PR purposes. Modder Daniel_K, author of the offending Vista drivers, has had his posts on the Creative forums reinstated. According to Creative the move was to avoid infringing on other company's IP. "Daniel_K is incensed by Creative. 'They publicly threatened me, just to show their arrogance,' he told El Reg by email. He told us that Creative contacted him on a chat session. 'They were sarcastic, ironic and asked me if I wanted something from them, as if I were expecting something,' he wrote. 'It was my protest against them and would like to see how far it would go.'"
The EULA is still null and void, and many courts have found an EULA to be unenforcable, especially in the state that Creative's headquarters were in - California. There's legal precedent all over.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
If you'll look I think you'll find that the downloads for his work number in the many 10's of thousands.
So I doubt it's just a few angry kids.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
Are you sure you understand copyright? You buy a book, you don't need a seperate license to read it. That's what you got by paying for the book. Software is no different, and when you buy a creative product you're buying hardware AND software.
Now, he doesn't have a right to distribute the software, but he probably has a right to distribute changes to it. If i tell my friends to read a book, and come up with a different ending, I'm allowed to tell them about it. I wouldn't be allowed to sell the book with one chapter replaced or anything.
What he should have done is release a program that changes a few bytes in the original file, not release a modified file. But your notion that you need a seperate license to use something you bought is obsurd, and I can modify the software all I like in the privacy of my home.
Onboard sound is fine for most applications, but it is not suitable for audio enthusiasts such as musicians who need low latency ASIO. The ASIO implementation on most on-board chipsets (that I have used) is atrocious to the point of being unusable.
The thing is, at the time of Ensoniq's implosion, they were eating Creative for breakfast in the soundcard biz. Ensoniq was first with PCI soundcards which were "Soundblaster compatible" (meaning they worked with old DOS games that talked directly to the SB16's ISA-bus register space; that's completely irrelevant now but a big deal back then) and Creative couldn't get their own stuff to work. And Gateway was buying Ensoniq's cards by the boatload, and other PC vendors were looking at doing the same.
It really is too bad that Ensoniq had issues that lead to Creative buying them. Basically, Creative didn't care about the musical instrument side of Ensoniq; Creative just bought Ensoniq to shut down their better competitor.
That's not how copyrights work. By default, you have no right to do anything with someone else's copyrighted work.
This is, of course, complete nonsense and exactly what the media companies want to to think. The mere act of an entity "publishing" i.e. making something available to the public, gives "the public" certain rights to that material. These rights are embodied by "fair use."
If you want more rights than fair use provides, then you need an agreement.
Ah, but he's not the one applying the patch and, therefore, he's not the one creating the derivative work. The end user is the one creating the derivative work and as long as they don't distribute the software to anyone else once they've done this then they aren't violating copyright laws.
Rules of Conduct:
#1 - The DM is always right.
#2 - If the DM is wrong, see rule #1