Yet another Hacker News

Synaptics patent claims stop work on DisplayLink drivers

104 points speckx 1 hour ago 47 comments

sedatk 1 hour ago | parent

Available only to subscribers, so, most of HN can't see this page I guess.

EDIT: Fixed now.

lobo_tuerto 1 hour ago | parent

It seems they made it available.

enchilada 1 hour ago | parent

LWN operates a kind of soft paywall as a form of try-before-you-buy

> The following subscription-only content has been made available to you by an LWN subscriber. Thousands of subscribers depend on LWN for the best news from the Linux and free software communities. If you enjoy this article, please consider subscribing to LWN. Thank you for visiting LWN.net!

sedatk 59 minutes ago | parent

Yes, I'm able to see it now.

adrian_b 57 minutes ago | parent

AFAIK, links to LWN pages are intentionally always visible to non-subscribers.

In any case, I am not a subscriber and I see it.

cyberax 34 minutes ago | parent

Subscribers can create a free link to the content. And all articles become publicly available after one week of paywall.

advisedwang 45 minutes ago | parent

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

> Are paywalls ok?

> It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds.

> In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so. But please don't post complaints about paywalls. Those are off topic. More here.

luckystarr 1 hour ago | parent

Is DisplayLink a company owned by Synaptics or just a file in a portfolio? How do they make money from DisplayLink except from selling the docks? Licensing?

dmitrygr 1 hour ago | parent

DisplayLink was acquired by Synaptics in 2022

luckystarr 32 minutes ago | parent

So they are and aren't part of OIN at the same time.

mzs 24 minutes ago | parent

They make money by authoring standards which force vendors to buy even more parts/licenses from them.

kotaKat 1 hour ago | parent

"Your actions are potentially putting tens of millions of dollars of yearly corporate revenue at risk."

https://static.lwn.net/images/pdf/Cease_and_Desist_Notice_Mi...

Fuck you, Synaptics.

mschuster91 1 hour ago | parent

> Fuck you, Synaptics.

Which is made funnier by the lawyer's name being Bateman. Sorry, could not resist that one.

What I find more ridiculous is the timing:

> You are to provide Synaptics, no later than 11:59 p.m. Pacific Time on October 11, 2026

The letter is dated "October 5, 2026". WTF are these lawyers smoking that they think 5 days is any reasonable time frame.

nicce 49 minutes ago | parent

> The letter is dated "October 5, 2026". WTF are these lawyers smoking that they think 5 days is any reasonable time frame.

They just try to keep the pressure up so that the other entity gives up before they have time to estimate whether any of the claims are valid. One person against big corporation, which is threatening with big penalties. A common tactic.

Beijinger 1 hour ago | parent

I predict a high chance that they lose this patent. Mark my words.

https://lkml.rescloud.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/2610.1/1...

According to patent prosecution records, the independent claims for GB2484736 originally lacked any network transport limitations and were deemed entirely unpatentable against the prior art listed above.

To get the patent granted, DisplayLink’s attorneys amended the claims to specifically add delivery of the display data over a "general-purpose data network." The validity challenge relies on proving that adding a general-purpose transport layer (like USB or Ethernet) to existing image-compression methodologies was an obvious step and completely unoriginal in 2010, given the widespread existence of USB monitors and network-attached graphics at the time.

dmitrygr 55 minutes ago | parent

> I predict a high chance that they lose this patent. Mark my words.

After how many dollars spent? I mean, it is good that eventually bad patents get killed, but it still costs too much to do it, one at a time. We need a more streamlined process, maybe? Maybe an academic-review-like process at filing? Send the claims anonymously to a few experts in the field, randomly selected. If they all say it is obvious, kill it immediately and fine the company for wasting the patent office's time?

Beijinger 40 minutes ago | parent

Ex Parte Reexamination (A streamlined request to have a USPTO examiner re-evaluate the patent) $6,775 (Streamlined, ≤ 40 pages)

I think we could get the 7 grand together here.

skissane 20 minutes ago | parent

This is a UK patent, the USPTO has no jurisdiction over it.

alright2565 54 minutes ago | parent

> mapping claim 11 of DisplayLink GB Patent No. 2484736 and claim 11 of DisplayLink GB Patent No. 2485613 to your Vino driver source code

As far as I can tell, these patents only go up to claim 10 in the first place:

- https://patents.google.com/patent/GB2484736A/en

- https://patents.google.com/patent/GB2485613A/en

skinfaxi 41 minutes ago | parent

Strange, I noticed that too. I couldn't find any other patent reference for GB Patent No. 2485613 with more than 10 claims.

eecc 50 minutes ago | parent

X11? RDP?

toomuchtodo 43 minutes ago | parent

Is this a potential use case for having a gen AI agent grind to put a prior art claim together? Feels like scanning and building prior art to challenge existing patents is a great use of AI agents, but I might be mistaken.

any1 28 minutes ago | parent

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5d8nwgiSYI

toomuchtodo 27 minutes ago | parent

Brilliant, thanks for the share.

deckar01 21 minutes ago | parent

You assume there is some logic to software patents. It looks like an extortion racket to me. If you don’t pay enough fire insurance the mob lets your competition burn your business down.

toomuchtodo 18 minutes ago | parent

If software patents are slop, you fight slop with slop.

It would take much human time to search for prior art across all of human knowledge for existing patents and new patents being proposed. But GPUs are tireless, and can continually grind towards success. They build their case for dismantling all existing active patents as long as they are kept fed.

If I were a frontier lab, I would be finding the most valuable patents, starting the research agents up, and then shorting companies that would see enterprise value decline if subject patents were invalidated. Just one way of monetizing the fancy search engine and token dispenser.

https://www.cloudflare.com/jengo/sable-prior-art-search/

https://www.eff.org/issues/patent-busting-project

Beijinger 43 minutes ago | parent

The patent generally covers methods and architectures for transmitting compressed screen updates over a general-purpose data network, such as USB or Ethernet, the patent specifically claims Haar-transform decoding.

So only the combination may be new. But this reminds me of a USPTO thing from my past.

The landmark ruling you are referring to is the U.S. Supreme Court case KSR International Co. v. Teleflex Inc. (2007), which led directly to the USPTO publishing its highly influential 2010 Examination Guidelines for Determining Obviousness. Under this framework, if element A is known and element B is known, combining them is not patentable if the combination yields nothing more than predictable results.

https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s2143.html

So, general-purpose data network, such as USB or Ethernet was known (A), claims Haar-transform decoding was known (B) [DE69909880T2 / EP0955609]. Even if we don't find this combination in prior art, it is dubious that this is patent worthy based on USPTO guidelines (combine A with B).

But I see a lot of stuff that suggests prior art:

1. Noriaki Yamazaki and Tetsuo Tanaka (2007). “ZYWRLE: Enhanced VNC Codec for Motion Picture.” IEICE Transactions, J90-D(7), pp. 1790–1798. Brief summary: Adds wavelet compression to VNC’s ZRLE codec for transmitting moving images, reducing network traffic to 20–50% of standard ZRLE. https://search.ieice.org/bin/summary.php?abst=j&category=D&i...

2. Joshua G. Senecal, Peter Lindstrom, Mark A. Duchaineau and Kenneth I. Joy (2004). “An Improved N-Bit to N-Bit Reversible Haar-Like Transform.” Proceedings of Pacific Graphics 2004, pp. 371–380. DOI: 10.1109/PCCGA.2004.1348368. Brief summary: Introduces PLHaar, a reversible Haar-like transform supporting lossy and lossless image compression without increasing coefficient bit width, suitable for bandwidth-limited video and graphics hardware. https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/15014239

3. Joshua G. Senecal, Mark A. Duchaineau and Kenneth I. Joy (2004). “Reversible n-Bit to n-Bit Integer Haar-Like Transforms.” Proceedings of the Data Compression Conference 2004, p. 564. Brief summary: Introduces lookup-table Haar-like transforms that preserve bit width and reversibility, with applications to fast image compression and streaming hardware such as DVI channels. https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/15013668

Good luck synaptic!

alright2565 13 minutes ago | parent

There's also a 2003 datasheet the describes basically the same compressed framebuffer transport as GB2485613: https://www.amd.com/content/dam/amd/en/documents/archived-te..., section 5.5.2

Also possibly related:

Method and apparatus for increasing memory resource utilization in an information stream decoder, https://patents.google.com/patent/WO1999057908A1/en

And a paper by a PHD student in 2005, Real-time Rendering with Wavelet-Compressed Multi-Dimensional Datasets on the GPU, https://cs.ucsb.edu/sites/default/files/documents/2005-05.pd...

Displaylink's own abandoned patent application talking about sending patches of compressed/uncompressed graphical data to the screen over USB: https://patents.google.com/patent/US20060119602A1/en

Using reference frames with Haar wavelet transforms in video compression, https://patents.google.com/patent/US6272180B1/en

gwittel 52 minutes ago | parent

It’s also disturbing they have the gall to demand tens of thousands of dollars for the task of specifying which of their 100+ maybe relevant patents he’s infringing.

Does UK patent law somehow work differently?

sourdecor 38 minutes ago | parent

Microsoft Is Making An Astonishing $2 Billion Per Year From Android Patent Royalties[0].

[0]: https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-earns-2-billion-pe...

mijoharas 47 minutes ago | parent

My company used to have some display link docks, which I was unable to use due to bugs in the Linux implementations.

For a while I'd keep an eye on updates to see if they'd been fixed but they never were before we moved office.

I'm going to be quite sure we don't get any more in any future offices (we don't have them at our current office)

herpdyderp 5 minutes ago | parent

Every DisplayLink hub or dock or adapter I've tried using has been a terrible nightmare. I've tried on Linux, macOS, and Windows. Now I actively avoid them.

saghm 44 minutes ago | parent

> The letter continued to claim that Lothian would be "single-handedly eviscerating DisplayLink's competitive advantage in this crowded market by educating our competitors and other third parties as to how we implement our proprietary technology"

If one guy can reverse-engineer everything with an LLM and some free time, I'm pretty sure their competitors can as well, and they won't be doing it out in the open like this guy was...

amoss 36 minutes ago | parent

You have to wonder if this part was approved by a qualified lawyer at all. A trade secret would describe proprietary knowledge of how to implement the technology, but would have no protection under patent law.

saghm 25 minutes ago | parent

They also repeatedly claimed "DisplayLink is not a member of OIN" when it actually is, and later when they acquiesced to the cease and desist, one of the actual engineers from the company tried to review the PR to ask for changes. It's not clear anyone there has any clue what's going on!

hnlmorg 40 minutes ago | parent

> I will also be sending to you our demand for substantial monetary compensation to recoup the cost and effort required to create such documentation of your infringing acts.

There is no universe in which this is a reasonable response.

xxpor 38 minutes ago | parent

I didn't think reverse engineering itself was a violation of a patent? The entire point of a patent is the public disclosure of the mechanism of an invention for the exclusive right to market that invention. Therefore arguing that reverse engineering is a violation of a patent is definitionally incorrect. They should be arguing it's a violation of trade secrets. Of course, they'd lose on that argument too because clean room reverse engineering of a trade secret is fine because you definitionally don't have a patent on it! That's the patent vs trade secret tradeoff!

Palomides 15 minutes ago | parent

no, a patent is exclusive right to implement, you can't get around it by reverse engineering

the tradeoff is that it becomes free eventually, unlike trade secrets

solarengineer 35 minutes ago | parent

Might be related to the acquisition by onsemi:

https://www.onsemi.com/company/newsroom/news-and-insights/on...

AdmiralAsshat 35 minutes ago | parent

> If you fail to comply with our demands by the specified deadline, Synaptics will seek monetary compensation from you in the amount of US$25,000 to recoup the costs and effort required to create the attached documentation of your infringing acts.

Obviously this is intended as a scare tactic, but, surely that could never hold up in court? Surely the burden of proof is on the owner of the patents to prove that someone's work is infringing, and you can't then say "We are charging the defendant to prove that we have a valid case against them." ?

anakaine 11 minutes ago | parent

They can attempt to sue for whatever they want. The court may or may not accept the case. Seeking the recovery of costs for enforcement of ones patents if the defendant does not stop infringing is not under heard of, though it is typically attached to a case seeking the courts ruling that the defendant must stop infringing.

gsich 28 minutes ago | parent

>Yes, you should be concerned. Very concerned, actually

Unbelievable mafia tactics from those clowns.

kieranl 28 minutes ago | parent

DisplayLink is dying due to high DDR prices. Dock companies are cancelling their display link portfolios due to the unfavorable economics.

Good riddance if this is how OSS is treated by synaptics.

Most recent thunderbolt docks and usb4 docks have good display support, and fallback to DisplayPort alt mode if the host does not support tbt4. Which is much better supported over type-c. Intel and AMD upstream host support.

j45 22 minutes ago | parent

How much ram does DisplayLink use?

paimapi 4 minutes ago | parent

On my computer around 500 MB for two additional 4K monitors but I've heard up to 1 GB. With the RAM crunch, running DL + Docker + browser (esp Chrome), it gets pretty laggy sometimes.

j45 18 minutes ago | parent

At some point there needs to be a test of when software is related to owning hardware.

Some questions that come to mind are:

Do you actually own the hardware?

Do you stop owning the hardware, meaning you're not allowed or able to use it once the company that's sold it to you stops providing or updating hardware?

Does every piece of hardware come with a guarantee that it will work on every piece of hardware that it's attached to forever?

These are just a few of the really troubling questions when people forget that software has to run on hardware. And the closer the software is to the core operation of a piece of hardware and equipment, the more topics like right to repair or right to maintain or right to optimize come up.

I never thought that a video card replacement driver would make me think of companies that are limiting Farmers from repairing and updating their own tractors.