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.'"

Comments

first post!

[Anonymous Coward]

modded illegally by the community!

Good for him

[Megaweapon]

The way Creative publically handled the situation was so stupid they deserve the continued bad publicity.

Re:Good for him

[Shados]

Seriously. It is so close to the corportate equivalent of "dumb suicide" that it should deserve a Darwin Award

Re:Good for him

[dgatwood]

I kind of wish they would die, if only so we wouldn't have to let down so many disappointed people who bought Creative's X-Fi and Audigy hardware thinking it would be a good card for home recording only to find out that it utterly sucks at it. Between the high latency and all the post-processing it does to make the sound "better" (much of which is apparently hard to turn off), it's about the worst possible choice for that use, yet Creative seems to market it as though it would be good for that. Not to mention that the sound quality on the inputs just isn't up to snuff compared to even the cheapest M-Audio hardware.

At a minimum, the company deserves the corporate equivalent of life in prison without parole for the number of people the company has harmed with their product claims.

Re:Good for him

[neumayr]

Tech companies exagerate their product's capabilities for marketing reasons, more news at 11 or something.

Re:Good for him

[DaleGlass]

Some of those geeks work at places like universities and large companies and make purchase decisions. Others give advice to less knowledgeable people.

An important thing to note here is that a dedicated soundcard is no longer a necessary component of a computer due to onboard sound. A large part of Creative's market are going people who decide on their own to buy a soundcard for some reason, and which card they choose will depend quite heavily on some geek's opinion.

Re:Good for him

[bhima]

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.

Re:Good for him

[Bombula]

It would definitely be nice if Creative died - or at least got some decent competition. It's a good example of a market totally dominated by one company that churns out crappy stuff. I know a fair bit about their EAX technology from personal experience, as I tried to patent a 3D positional audio technology in the mid 90s. Aureal beat me to it, but they folded. I think their IP ended up with another company called Sensaura. They're gone now too, and their site directs to ... Creative.

Still no true 3D positional audio through EAX either, just some hackneyed binaural cues. It's a shame, but I guess that's just how the stone rolls.

Re:Good for him

[Shados]

The assertion from the previous poster basically meant "You can have a working, full featured computer without having to care about buying a sound card, a bit like you can do the same with network cards".

Last time this subject came up, I said that onboard sound was more than good enough: multiple people proved me wrong, and indeed, i was, so I'm not going to try and argue that. However, point is, for 90% of people, the computer will be functional as is. Games will run fine, their MP3s will play fine (and I can't hear any noise introduced by the board during playback, and its quite limited and hard to notice during recording... of course, not viable for professional work), everything will be "good enough" to the average joe (as opposed to videocards, where even Joe will realise really quickly that his onboard video isn't good enough when he can't even run a 3 years old game on his machine).

So that means that ALMOST EVERYONE who buys a sound card, knows what they want. Low noise, professional features, instrument ports, specific encoder/decoders support, and they'll want quality (and the tone of your post is quite in line with this statement).

So Creative cannot sell shitty feature-less cards easily. They have to have a LOT over an onboard card for someone to want it.

Re:Good for him

[mcmonkey]

Throw in Hi def gaming, or a real media center, and a soundcard isn't just an enthusiasts upgrade, it's a necessity.

IOW, it is just an enthusiasts upgrade.

Re:Good for him

[Bassman59]

The only thing they had going for them once upon a time was Ensoniq's IP, which they proceeded to flush down the crapper.

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.

Re:Good for him

[DRAGONWEEZEL]

Haha, after re-reading that, it appears you are correct. In a slashdot 1st... I conceede I stand corrected!

Re:Good for him

[Anonymous Coward]

100$ motherboards (e.g. gigabyte P35-DS3L) nowadays have perfectly fine Intel HDA/Realtek high def audio onboard. My gigabyte P35-DS3R (Realtek ALC 889A codec) has 7.1 + 2 channel audio (7.1 and stereo, playing independently, at the same time), supports all the latest HD audio codecs used by Blu-Ray, does 192 kHz / 24 bit audio, has a spdif (coax) and toslink (optical) outputs, as well as GREAT (and very loud) headphone output via the onboard jumper block. Same SNR as a Audigy 2 (106 db). Works fine with windows and linux too (great drivers too, unlike creative). No forced internal resampling like SB live, no phony processing (e.g. the x-fi's crystallizer), it can do bit-perfect playback too, etc. Great set of inputs/outputs too (6 analog, toslink, spdif, plus the ones in front of my case) -- much better than the basic creative cards (e.g. the X-Fi's spdif out is also the mic in!) The only thing I can think of that could be nice to have over that, is dolby digital live, and some even have it (e.g. ALC888 DD).

The amount of ppl doing recording on their home PC is likely below 1%. Those might need multichannel low-latency ASIO, but for the rest of us, onboard auio is more than good enough. It's not like the crappy AC97 of 10 years ago anymore.

Re:Good for him

[Anonymous Coward]

on-board sound is "good enough" for most users. most people think mp3 is a high-quality format, and those people will never be able to hear a difference in sound quality anyway. if you have a few tb's of .flac flies, on-board sound isn't for you. but then again if you were the type to prefer flac over mp3, you'd already know that. i guess my point is that anyone who asks "is on-board sound good enough?" is probably going to be just happy with it. many of the on-board options exceed the quality of dedicated mp3 players, so if you listen to an ipod constantly, you'd probably think the on-board sound on many mobos is fabulous.

Backing down or CYA Manuver?

[scubamage]

Given that NVidia is getting nailed with a class action lawsuit because of handicapped drivers, I have to wonder if Creative's withdrawal is less a product of PR and more of fear that they could be put in a similar court situation. I mean, punishing someone because they release un-crippled versions of your drivers kind of spotlights your company for having crippled drivers in the first place - the basis of the nvidia case.

Re:Backing down or CYA Manuver?

[zappepcs]

does it really matter whether they were trying to save face, or trying to save their asses in court?

Either way, the Internet has yet again handily shown another large corporate entity that 'do no evil' is a pretty damned good motto.

That once letter to the local paper editor gets millions of reads these days. Despite their efforts, many businesses and their practices are transparent to the public whether they like it or not. The "blowback" from that is what some like to call 'market forces' at work :)

Google was rather bright to call everything beta, and only put a line through the word when everyone was happy with how it works. When you produce products and make claims of a general nature and have no clear plan with how to deal with those inevitable questions from reviewers and users... well, blowback is the natural response.

Trying to hush up the competition is ... er... illegal. Trying to hush those that would expose you to the competition is essentially the same thing, and quite the example of not 'don't be evil'.

It's just a shame that the folks at Creative had to fsck it up like this when they could have created a PR positive experience of it.

Re:Backing down or CYA Manuver?

[Kandenshi]

I'm pretty sure that the lesson is "don't do evil in ways where you stand a good chance of getting caught. Do lots and lots of evil (if it's profitable) in areas where you're not likely to get bad publicity/legal action out of it.

Re:Backing down or CYA Manuver?

[Enderandrew]

You never know when you might get caught, so the actual lesson is "don't be evil".

Re:Backing down or CYA Manuver?

[timster]

You're forgetting that some Slashdotters have been taught that there's some law requiring corporations to be evil as long as there is profit in it. After all, if it's in a documentary it must be true.

Re:Backing down or CYA Manuver?

[garett_spencley]

I prefer a "always do evil" philosophy. Sure some people may get mad at you and you may get bad PR etc. but "do no evil" is boring. "Do evil" is a great way to ensure that things stay interesting.

Think about it...

Where would Slashdot be if Microsoft was not an evil monopolistic corporation ?

Where would Slashdot be if the RIAA were not suing grandmothers and college students ?

Where would Slashdot be if Jack Thompson was not suing video game manufacturers ?

Where would Slashdot be if Creative released Vista drivers that work ?

You see, by being evil you effectively bring life to the Internet. Without evilness no one would have anything to bitch about and everyone would be too busy watching porn and looking up peach cobbler recipes. FUCK THAT!

Re:Backing down or CYA Manuver?

[geekboy642]

It's not a law. It's the fact that corporations are beholden, essentially, to only their shareholders. The shareholders, by and large, want only one thing: more profit. Corporations thus function like an entity at Pre-Conventional Stage 2 morality, or the "what's in it for me?" stage (refc. Kohlberg). This does not mean they have an emphasis on doing evil, this means they don't care whether what they do is evil or not.

They only care about not getting caught when they do evil. Creative was caught, and now they are back-peddling to try to avoid the consequences of their actions.

This doesn't happen with free software

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes Creative is acting adversarial, but what you must understand is that

Daniel_k had no right to modify Creative's software. They did not grant

him the right and he was not using an OS that granted him any rights.

People need to start purchasing products which give them the freedom to

use the product. What I'm saying is that when you buy a product you

should especially look for one feature: freedom.

http://fsf.org/ For more information about software freedoms please see

the Free Software Foundation's homepage.

Re:This doesn't happen with free software

[Khyber]

Umm, Creative's HQ was based in California. The EULA Creative had on those driver was NULL AND VOID by California. Daniel had EVERY right to modify the software as he saw fit. I pointed this out to Creative's Lawyers, and they capitulated VERY FAST.

Re:This doesn't happen with free software

[iamacat]

Daniel_k had no right to modify Creative's software. The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

Care to explain how constitution, or a constitutional law of Daniel_k's states prohibits him from distributing patches to Creative's drivers, provided that he neither distributes patched drivers directly nor do the patches contain Creative's copyrighted code in excess of fair use amount needed for interoperability.

Now, it's possible that Daniel did not release his work properly, but he sure has "powers" to modify Creative's code.

Re:This doesn't happen with free software

[Martin Blank]

I'm curious as to the foundations of this. You state that he had the right to modify the drivers, but did this give him the right to distribute them? And since Daniel lives in Brazil, how does this affect the EULA?

Mind you, I think Creative was a complete asshat over this, but the legal basis still intrigues me.

Re:This doesn't happen with free software

[Khyber]

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.

Re:This doesn't happen with free software

[hardburn]

That's not how copyrights work. By default, you have no right to do anything with someone else's copyrighted work. It's only through a license agreement that you have any right to even use Creative's code. If the EULA is entirely null-and-void, then there's nothing else that gives you right to use it. Note that certain portions of an EULA wouldn't necessarily hold up in court (technically, they could say that you must sacrifice your firstborn on the Temple of Sho'ka'rei, but that doesn't mean it'd hold up in court), however there has to be something that gives you the right to use it.

Mind you, that all means nothing in the court of public opinion. While Creative might have had the legal right, their actions made them look like senseless bullies. It would have been far more productive to give the guy a job and release his changes officially.

Re:This doesn't happen with free software

[plague3106]

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.

Re:This doesn't happen with free software

[Hal_Porter]

It's more complex than that.

From here
http://forums.creative.com/creativelabs/board/message?board.id=soundblaster&thread.id=116332

We are aware that you have been assisting owners of our Creative sound cards for some time now, by providing unofficial driver packages for Vista that deliver more of the original functionality that was found in the equivalent XP packages for those sound cards. In principle we don't have a problem with you helping users in this way, so long as they understand that any driver packages you supply are not supported by Creative. Where we do have a problem is when technology and IP owned by Creative or other companies that Creative has licensed from, are made to run on other products for which they are not intended. We took action to remove your thread because, like you, Creative and its technology partners think it is only fair to be compensated for goods and services. The difference in this case is that we own the rights to the materials that you are distributing. By enabling our technology and IP to run on sound cards for which it was not originally offered or intended, you are in effect, stealing our goods. When you solicit donations for providing packages like this, you are profiting from something that you do not own. If we choose to develop and provide host-based processing features with certain sound cards and not others, that is a business decision that only we have the right to make. Someone else put it like this -

1) The licence agreement which we all accept to says that we must not reverse engineer or tamper with the software as it is the property of Creative Labs.
2) I firmly believe that Daniel K has caught the flack because of the Dolby Digital feature As far as I am aware Auzentech paid a lot of money for an exclusive licence with Dolby to have their cards support this. Now, Creative would get into trouble if they allow a means for this to be "cracked" to run on non-Auzentech cards.
3) Accepting money (even in the form of donations) for someone elses copyrighted material is a big NO NO. Now let's suppose that he has a legal right to reverse engineer 1), and they are willing to ignore 3). There's still a problem with 2), that his drivers allow Dolby Digital on non Auzentech cards. It seems like Auzentech make cards based on the Creative chipset but they pay royalties to Dolby for some Dolby code/patents. The official Creative driver always has the code but only enables it on Auzentech cards.

Now Daniel_K comes along and enables the code on Creative cards. Dolby finds out and complains to Auzentech since they probably signed a contract that only allows them to use the technology on their cards. Auzentech complains to Creative who've signed a contract to enforce this in the driver. And things look bad for Creative, since they allowed him to post the crack on their forum.

So it's not the Vista driver he's in trouble for, it's unlocking Dolby on Creative cards.

That said, the traditional way to handle this is to negotiate in private not on some internet forum, offer the guy a job and so on. And release the missing Vista drivers.

Re:This doesn't happen with free software

[mlwmohawk]

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.

Re:This doesn't happen with free software

[GameMaster]

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.

screw creative

[nuzak]

Fire the people who badgered him. No, not the legal folks, they're just doing their due diligence, but the PM's who decided it was okay to actually harrass and intimidate the guy.

An apology and an announcement of a policy change from here forward would also work.

Otherwise, all I see is that they got caught and decided they'd just try other means to shut down unauthorized, uh, "unbreaking". There's also the whole deliberate breakage to begin with.

As things stand right now, my only outstanding question for resolving the Creative debacle is "Turtle Beach or m-Audio?"

Too little, too late

[mrmeval]

Release uncrippled drivers now.

It's not just me that won't buy your products it's every computer I build, it's every person I talk to, it's every decision my company makes that I can sway against you, it's every law I can turn against you.

Miserable excuses by Creative

[TheHawke]

They just grate on my nerves, saying that their drivers are hung up in the Vista approval process. I'd say that they are just buying time to release new products so they can make more profit off of NEW product instead of spending cash on support for old. The pattern shows in the forums as well as their support pages.
I've seen more than a few companies simply bypass vista's certification process and release their updates, with instructions on how to circumvent Vista security checks. Good for them, bad for vista.

Re:Liars or idiots (or both)

[ArcticCelt]

Yeah but the point here is that they voluntarily cripple their drivers because they don't want their old product to be fully compatible with Vista in hope that the customer will buy new hardware from them. It's not incompetence here, it's only a shitty evil corporate strategy.

An Excuse Breathes Its Last and Croaks

[hyades1]

Lord knows I'm no fan of Vista, but it seems to me that Creative was trying to lay their own incompetence or dishonest marketing plans off on Microsoft. They must have been pretty embarrassed when this guy came along with a set of working drivers to blow their alibi out of the water. I sincerely hope the people who made the decision to harass him are shown the door in a very public way. Proper damage control requires on less.

Let's be clear here

[g051051]

While I respect his skills, Daniel_K didn't actually write replacement drivers that did things Creative couldn't...he reverse engineered the existing drivers and patched out the OS level checks, or he swapped parts of code from other drivers into play, to enable features that were specifically disabled by Creative. He then made those modified, repackaged drivers available, which is a big problem for Creative, and the reason why they tried to shut Daniel_K down.

Re:Let's be clear here

[TimboJones]

My takeaway from this has been that Creative cards on Vista are technically capable of supporting advanced, proprietary audio features, but not legally allowed to support these features without... licensing fees?

No leg to stand on anyway: Tortuous Interference

[mlwmohawk]

I wrote the last time this came up that Daniel did nothing wrong. All he did is phrase his donations plea poorly.

Since the drivers he made available were generally available anyway, he did not run afoul of copyright for making his changes available. (assuming he uses the words "for support work" and not "for the drivers") He could use "patch" just to be 100% sure.

As a consultant I can (and have done) modify third party hardware and software for the benefit of a customer who has proper ownership of the hardware and license to the software and I may change for that service and there's NOTHING the third party vendor can do about it.

The relationship Daniel has with the user of a driver with his modifications is of no business to Creative. In fact, Creative may be worried that they are interfering with Daniels business. If you are curious look up "Tortuous Interference."

Daniel *did* make money from his work. He could have a case against Creative's very public accusation.

I didn't even though these drivers existed

[goldcd]

until I saw all of this kick off. Downloaded them, installed them and my Audigy2 ZS behaves better. Also my ancient Audigy drivers (also Creative's latest version) were noted as being the reason Vista SP1 refused to install. Swapped out for the modded ones, and next day SP1 pops up for autoupdate. In all seriousness I'd never touch a Creative soundcard ever again. Had SB1, SB Pro, SB16, AWE32 etc etc - only breaking away for a brief flirtation with a Gravis Ultrasound (lovely lovely card, but software support was a pain in the arse). In this new age of 'sound being taken for granted' I'd initially just used onboard audio, but then realized it was a bit cheap and nasty (I don't need 7.1 - and the hiss is driving me insane). Anyhoo - I don't like onboard, creative take the piss out of their customers (ffs they insist on mailing me the most stupidly overpriced 'offers' after a mistakenly gave them my email). What're the alternatives? Xonar?

Onboard sound = poor ASIO

[DigitAl56K]

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.

They ought to start by...

[cptdondo]

shitcanning the VP who approved this stuff. Publicly. Then issuing a public apology.

Anyone who gets this heavy-handed in today's internet society is far out of touch with his/her customer base, and has no reason to be employed by a company that makes computer equipment.

In other words, incompetent to the point of being actively harmful to the well-being and even survival of the company itself.