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Nvidia Looks To Gag Journalists With Multi-Year Blanket NDAs (hardocp.com)
The German website Heise reports that Nvidia's new non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) last for five years and are more far reaching than product-specific information. HardOCP explains what NDAs are and shares an excerpt from Heise's report: First and foremost, I should tell you that NDAs in the tech world are nothing new, but those non-disclosure agreements usually are product-specific and date-specific. Say we agree to get a review sample of video card X. Many times we will get an NDA that is specific to releasing any information shared by card X's representative and a date when we can share that information with you, often referred to as the "embargo date."
[Here's the excerpt from Heise about Nvidia's new NDA]: "The NDA should apply to all information provided by Nvidia, so it did not refer to a specific product or information. There was also no concrete expiration date. It was also full of conditions that ran counter to journalistic principles. Our legal department clapped their hands over their heads as they read the document. In other words, journalists are allowed to write only what fits Nvidia in the junk. In doing so, Nvidia downgrades the independent press into a marketing tool." There are several forums discussing Nvidia's new NDA. HardOCP has shared a copy of the NDA for you to read and make up your own mind.
[Here's the excerpt from Heise about Nvidia's new NDA]: "The NDA should apply to all information provided by Nvidia, so it did not refer to a specific product or information. There was also no concrete expiration date. It was also full of conditions that ran counter to journalistic principles. Our legal department clapped their hands over their heads as they read the document. In other words, journalists are allowed to write only what fits Nvidia in the junk. In doing so, Nvidia downgrades the independent press into a marketing tool." There are several forums discussing Nvidia's new NDA. HardOCP has shared a copy of the NDA for you to read and make up your own mind.
Nvidia downgrades the independent press into a marketing tool.
Nvidia will be the envy of all other companies.
You can still review and write articles about Nvidia products without signing the NDA. What's going on is that Nvidia is trading privileged access for control over the articles. Nvidia gives journalists the ability to make money from writing early to press, special access articles about Nvidia products in trade for control over the content.
Sign the NDA; so nvidia feels confident in their control of the flow of information. Then, just stop writing about nvidia. Nothing. Some new autonomous car maker is using an nvidia processor? Refer it to as a 'generic industry ML engine'. When writing about AMD, refer to the competitors as 'unspecific reference cards'. Don't give them a single word of free advertising. Let them choke on their own attempt to smother the media.
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The only sensible course is to refuse to sign. Any reviewer can still buy their products at retail without having to sign anything; they just don't get advance access to the products or a chance to pick the company's brains. Their reviews will be a little bit later than those who sign and get to use the product before its official release, but the kind of buyer who wants the new product as soon as it's released wasn't going to listen to reviews anyway.
The other thing to do is to make it explicit that you didn't sign an NDA to get the product you reviewed. There's a reason the most serious reviewers already make sure to review retail products rather than company provided ones: companies have been known to provide a different product to reviewers from what they sell to the general public. Any reviewer who's signing an NDA and getting what may be a custom, tuned product rather than what an ordinary buyer would get isn't trustworthy anyway.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
I'm guessing they're trying to avoid that. It's been 2 years since they've put out a new card. It'll be 3 or 4 by the time they finally do something. That's going to be a major generational leap, and when it happens it's going to render last gen's cards obsolete. They're worried about folks who stop buying cards waiting for the new stuff.
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NVidia can ask/require anything they want -- that doesn't mean reputable journalists [where?] will agree. They just won't review NVidia products as early, or at all. NVidia loses the free publicity in a very-short-term effort to reduce negative reviews. Are they going out of business? I thought they had leading vidcards. They must think not.
The rest of us will know the disreputable journalists by their early NVidia reviews. Just makes me buy Radeon.
This is probably nVidia's response to the market heating up.
First, it looks like AMD Vega 20 is going to outperform Pascal. Based on remarks from nVidia's CEO, the next-gen Turing architecture is probably going to be released in 2019. Since Vega 20 will probably be out this year, for the first time in a while AMD will hold the GPU performance crown for about one year, maybe more if Turning doesn't deliver. On top of that, for the first time in a decade Intel is now a big wildcard. Current rumor is Intel will be releasing a discrete GPU in 2020. Intel hired the guy from AMD that lead the development of Vega, so chances are Intel actually means business this time.
To sum it all up, things are not looking very good for nVidia right now. So they are acting early to prevent journalists from reporting a possible fall from grace if it were to happen in the near future.
nVidia is mad that the Geforce Partner Program got scrapped due to negative press. So instead of just taking the L and moving on with life, they're now going to try to ram a different but equally awful idea down journalists' throats instead.
This seems like the product of either Nvidia's lawyers going a but crazy or something not going well on their end:
It's already the case that tech journalism is strongly 'access' based; whether the company likes you or not pretty much dictates whether you get review samples in time to have a full write-up on release day or get ignored in favor of people who do(which, given how much of the interest is in cutting edge stuff really hurts). However, unlike other 'access' dominated areas(reporting on government or military, say); the window where undesirable 3rd parties can be kept away is limited: you can uninvite them to E3 hype sessions and make sure that they don't have a new product far enough ahead of time to be able to show comprehensive benchmarks on release day; but you are still releasing a consumer product with distribution controlled only by price.
Someone trying to get a Pentagon story without cooperation could spend years or decades trying to FOIA stuff or have it undergo automatic classification review due to age. Someone writing about video cards can have unlimited physical access to a sample for under $1000(except certain pro/specialty parts) as soon after release day as they can find one in stock.
Given that, I don't really understand what Nvidia is seeking to achieve here: it's already pretty easy to get tech sites that depend on having day-one hardware reviews and 'exclusive' pre-release to toe the line; but also pretty much impossible to keep a lid on people who are willing to test retail samples without your cooperation; or to clamp down on anonymous sources giving The Register material to write snarky articles about your underfill woes or the like. What is it that isn't currently controlled that Nvidia thinks it needs to(and has any hope of) control?