Save yourself time and money - avoid DisplayLink.
At least part of the effort was posted in mailing list though https://lwn.net/Articles/1078474/ - I hope the recent repository has been mirrored too.
There's also https://github.com/durhamaustin9/DisplayLink-Drivers-Reconst... you may want to preserve locally.
Frankly all RE and emulation projects should at least have a mirror there.
What ever was wrong with just selfhosting your own git server, again? Or mirroring it to a handful of different providers in different countries.
[0] As previously covered on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49817524
Selfhosted git servers don’t automatically replicate without extra tooling and don’t provide collaboration and project tracking features. The goal is to replace something like Github with a distributed, automated, integrated setup. Not easy to accomplish.
Once it’s mature, this will create the ability to easily host project infrastructure across multiple nodes, owned by multiple people, where you can verify integrity as long as you accessed the repository in the past. If the hosting nodes are behind Tor, this will be a very secure setup. For repos that may face legal attacks, like emulators and tools like yt-dlp, this is huge.
Thousands of developers are going to do this now.
It is my strongly-held opinion that, regardless of what you think about AI in general, reverse engineering projects ought to stay as far away as possible from LLM code gen as possible. They are a very easy and straightforward way for a copyright owner to claim access to their code, since basically ALL code was trained on. Unless you have hard evidence the particular bit of code you want to RE was not in the training set, you should not use an LLM to reverse-engineer or rewrite it.
This is not a moral argument; as much as I hate AI companies playing fast and loose with other people's work, the underlying arguments that make RE legal work much better if you do not look at the source code. And while US judges are straining to keep AI training fair use, that does not make the AI a copyright laundering device. A copyright owner can absolutely reach through a fair use to get to you. Think of it like if you downloaded 10 different YouTube video essays on the same movie and attempted to stitch them together into a normal copy of the underlying movie. Obviously, your use has a different (and worse) legal status than the reviews do.
Also, fuck Synaptics.
On the other hand, it's been great for poking at cheap IoT devices and figuring out how to interact without crappy proprietary apps.
With typical clean room RE you get two artificers with clean copyrightbility - a fair use spec describing the system, a new implementation. This is not legally required, but the paper trail is a good defense.
If AI writes the spec, it may have just tainted itself if that work is then used to in future training. The output is not protected by copyright, but that probably doesn’t matter. If AI writes the output, there is no protection over that either, which may or may not matter.
Ultimately, however, this is a mechanical, derivative work. It isn’t washed because no creative human expression was introduced in either phase.
If the phases are split into AI writing the spec and human writing the implementation, and the spec is determined to be infringing, the implementation is infringing. The AI spec has no judgement over what’s copyrightable expression in the original, and there’s a high likelihood it produces an unauthorized derivative.
If a human writes the spec and an AI writes the code, the output is probably clean, but also not copyrightable. This is less of a concern for open source projects written by a single maintainer, but may have effects for larger projects or proprietary projects. However, writing the spec is the harder of the two parts and what people like using AI for.
Even though many of those "richest corporations" trained their models on huge quantities of torrented ("pirated") copyrighted content and other such "stolen" data. Nothing at all questionable there... LOL
Wouldn't that be on Synaptics to prove? And with how protective they seem to be of their IP, I doubt their code is in the training set
And furthermore, the real victory is not in the courts; the real victory is staying out of the courts to begin with. If you win in court, you still lost huge sums of money. And a lot of staying out of court boils down to restricting one's conduct to things a plaintiff's lawyer would counsel against suing for. Hence why most legal opinions in the FOSS space are unusually conservative (while still, occasionally, just being completely off-base).
I think the copyright holder should prove first in court, that his super secret specs or code was effectively used for training the AI.
At the same time, if we're being honest, Synaptics will have sent the C&D no matter what. They are an anti-consumer company with more lawyers than engineers, so of course they'll use all their resources to bully any competition, especially the most vulnerable.
Using it inside the clean room is more of an issue.
You lose that if you use an LLM which was trained on the original expression.
To keep the clean room clean, you'd need to use an LLM which you could prove had never seen the original.
>To keep the clean room clean, you'd need to use an LLM which you could prove had never seen the original.
In this true though? It seems the jury is out on whether or not LLM outputs are considered “new” or not legally speaking.
Not exactly, and that's an unhelpful way to think about it. Copyright law, technically speaking, DGAF about whether you are using an LLM or not. Yes, there has been a lot of talk about whether LLM outputs qualify for copyright protection. And the answer isn't completely straightforward, but the ultimate answer doesn't have anything to do with LLMs -- the law requires a certain modicum of human creativity to qualify for copyright protection. So the real legal answer is that it depends less on whether you are using an LLM and more about how you as a human are using it. That line isn't well litigated yet -- but in general, if you want a copyright, you need to be ready to explain how human creativity was involved -- that's, by definition, the only thing copyright protects.
BUT, this doesn't matter at all in this situation, we're not questioning the copyright protection status of the LLM output, we're questioning whether it violates someone else's IP.
The point of clean room reverse engineering is a defense to prove you could not have violated IP rights of others (not just copyright, but also trade secrets, and patents). The entire point of the exercise is that the implementation team has never seen the original work, so it is impossible for them to have copied the expression. They only could have come to it coincidentally by implementing the idea in the same way. This protects you from a copyright lawsuit because copyright only protects expression, not ideas.
LLMs, are proven to possess the capability to reproduce expression: exhibited as overfitting and/or memorization. So, to form the same defense with an LLM, you'd have to prove that the LLM couldn't possibly be overfitting or repeating from memory. And the best way to do that is to do it the same way it is done with humans: you need to ensure they never saw (i.e. wasn't trained on) the subject of the reverse engineering.
If you don't do this, here's what happens:
You go to court, the plaintiff says "look, this code is basically the same as ours!". The defense says "no, we super duper promise we didn't copy it, we just coincidentally came up with very close to the same thing". They ask "well did your developers ever see our code before?" ...and... <drumroll> the outcome depends on that answer.
It's the exact same situation with an LLM. If it almost exactly produces something that is already copyrighted, the plain simple answer is that the model was overfitting or memorizing the training inputs. You need a believable defense to that.
I think that’s a bit of an undeserved framing personally
I disagree. The WINE project settled all this reverse engineering legal nonsense a long time ago. They can file all the suits they want but they will just get dismissed.
The threats of Synaptics are dangerous only because they claim patent infringement, for which it does not matter whether reverse engineering was clean or not.
I think you're exactly right that the western world would continue to innovate without patents. I think what you're missing is that the rent-seeking would continue as normal, simply by using trade secrets, obfuscation, services-models, etc.
Patents was supposed to be a tool to enable competition, but does the reverse now - and it is holding as back as society. We should move away from it. Especially and specifically when it comes to vague, loose ideas just like the GP post says here.
Like when you looked at all the confusing and unwanted "2-in-1" and hybrid computer designs the thing you looked at was that they twisted themselves into pretzels to include... a trackpad! For most applications other than "working on an airplane" a true tablet with a bluetooth keyboard and mouse is so preferable but for various reasons the industry never showed it to you.
Not something everyone values unfortunately.
> In addition, as I have previously made clear to you, by open sourcing our proprietary DisplayLink technology for whatever personal reasons you may have as a "hobbyist," you 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 market-leading proprietary technology. We have gone to great lengths and great expense to prevent such disclosures and protect our market space. Your actions are potentially putting tens of millions of dollars of yearly corporate revenue at risk.
> In short, by your ongoing actions, you are effectively making a significant, dramatic, and grave business decision on behalf of Synaptics and DisplayLink that you have absolutely no authority to make. Given the magnitude of the potential damages at stake, we cannot and will not let this happen. We demand your immediate cessation of your infringing activities, and we will continue to escalate this matter through every available legal channel if you fail to comply.
Now there are going to be hundreds of clones.
Synoptics deserves to lose everything, if this is how they want to behave.
The stupid thing is that Synaptics benefits from a popular open source driver that is compatible with their hardware, spending tokens on this is an investment in the DisplayLink platform!
If Synaptics embraced open source they would have some respect and authority over the main line branch, instead now FireBurn has the respect and authority and Synaptics has our distrust and disdain.
This makes no sense. If they're screaming about their patents then detailed specs of the tech would be publicly available via the patents office for whomever wants to have a look. They can't make an argument about losing competitive advantage because that's what valid patents are supposed to protect. And I think there is some kind of hobbyist-friendly clause in patent law, similar to fair use, that allows non-commercial 3rd party implementation of patents, so ultimately they have no valid argument against this, just deep pockets to bury hobbyists in legal fees for daring to clean-copy "their" tech.
The problem is that many companies are able to patent things that are too vague and use them as leverage even if they probably shouldn't be valid patents.
It is a balance, though. If you patent something too specific, e.g. irrelevant implementation details, your patent is worthless because anyone could just change the irrelevant parts.
Chemical companies love this -- just look at the refrigerant racket. Or the medicine racket. Both will wait until their current patent expires, then have a new slightly-modified one granted, and get the old product regulated out of existence. The end result is that they keep a monopoly for effectively life, even though expiring patents are supposed to eventually create an open market.
This works best in industries where chemicals need to be tested and approved before they can be used. Otherwise, one would be able to simply change irrelevant implementation details.
It's clear that Synaptics doesn't have the software development resources to keep up with their drivers, if they had anyone competent in charge they would shift their focus all on hardware and embrace and encourage open source DisplayLink drivers. Now I'm in the same position, shopping for a new docking station that is not hostile users and stuck with Synaptics' worthless e-waste that I spent hundreds of dollars on! I'll never trust a company that keeps their drivers closed source ever again.
Thats where all the anti-DRM tools are, along with Bypass paywalls free, and a bunch of other useful "illegal" tools.
And the real answer: use OcuLink. It's just a PCIE lane->cable hardware, and is simple, cheaper, and just works. Doesnt even use drivers, as its just an extension of the PCIE lanes. Standard Linux tools work perfectly.
This also just seems stupid to me, you don't pay for the DisplayLink software you pay for the hardware. More options for how to use your hardware would be a good thing to them would it not?
Though it sounds like much of the issue was that it wasn't really "clean-room" which is a separate issue. Though unclear if that really is at the root of it or not.
Vino is the only thing stopping me from throwing the damn thing away and makes me far more likely to buy another / recommend DisplayLink hardware to a friend.
Would this be less prone to takedowns?
"You are going to need it" sounds ominous.
I think the cat is somewhat out of the bag with open models around though, their capabilities for pretty much uninhibited RE are scary.
Even Apple has real GPU support for multiple displays now. It's time for DisplayLink to die.
However, there are many other countries worldwide whose legal systems are very different, and would be much less favourable to Synaptics—what will they do if (say) a Chinese or Russian developer takes over the project?
The time for the cyber/solar punk counterculture is now. It's more real, more fun, more dangerous than anything written about in fiction, a real world sandbox with epic scope and divine proportions.