What if a third-party reverse engineers the specifications and releases an open driver, regardless of what the HDMI Forum wishes?
That might not matter much for an ordinary PC, but this Steam Machine will be competing for the living room with the PS5 and Xbox which have Netflix, Disney, HBO, etc; Not sure if things like Spotify are HDCP-protected.
It will be interesting to see how Valve works out the kinks for that. Honestly in general it'll be interesting, because putting those things on Steam Store basically turns Steam Store into a general software store instead of a game store. And the only cross-platform store at that.
With iOS and Android being broken open, you could have games be completely cross-licensed. I'd say other software too, but sadly with everything going the subscription model, you usually already have cross-licensing, in the form of an account.
The source and the sink need a HDCP-licence. Both devices have embbed keys that get exchanged to estabish a encrypted channel. Without the licence you can't get the required key material.
AFAIK, you can even sell HDMI devices without HDCP. Practically though, every entertainment device needs HDCP support.
looking at the available information on HDCP, it looks like the transmitter does not have to be authenticated - they use the receiver's pubkey, much like a web browser transmits to an HTTPS server
The suit over usage of "HDMI" in a reverse engineered version would wind up arguing whether or not HDMI is a genericised term and the HDMI Forum would lose their trademark. They will throw every cent they have into preventing such a decision and it'll get ugly
One doesn't get to use the logo or even the typeface, but that's not a dealbreaker at all for the purposes being discussed here. Words themselves are OK (and initialisms, such as "HDMI," are just a subset of words like nouns and verbs are).
The wiki has some background: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_use
In some jurisdictions, yes; however, some would probably still distribute it anyway, on purpose or not. I doubt all of them would get sued either, since lawsuits are expensive and difficult.
From my perspective, the objective is to make enforcement impractical.
Isn't that actually a pretty good workaround? Hardware vendor pays for the license, implements the standard, sells the hardware. Linux kernel has a compatible implementation, relying on the first sale doctrine to use the patent license that came with the hardware, and then you could run it on any hardware that has the port (and thereby the license). What's the problem?
First-sale doctrine protects against copyright or trademark infringement. You might be thinking of "patent exhaustion"[1], which is a mostly US-specific court doctrine that prevents patent holders from enforcing license terms against eventual purchasers of the patented invention. There is no "transitive law of patent licensing", so-to-speak.
In this case, it would still not protect Valve if they exercise each claim in the relevant patents by including both hardware and an unlicensed implementation of the software process. It would protect end users who purchased the licensed hardware and chose to independently install drivers which are not covered by the license.
It's murky if Valve would infringe by some DeCSS-like scheme whereby they direct users to install a third-party HDMI 2.1 driver implementation on first boot, but I don't think they would risk their existing HDMI license by doing so.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exhaustion_doctrine_under_U.S....
Could it actually be made? I kind of wonder that. Like if one of the things you have to do is claim to the other device that you’re 2.1 would that get you in trouble? Or if you just advertise all the features and they each work is that good enough?
My only concern there is the protocol stuff I mentioned.
nintendo tried that with the gameboy. games had to have a copy of the nintendo logo in them. i dont think it was ever tested in court though.
This methodology has been shown to be an effective shield against copyright infringement, but it does not protect you from patent infringement. Presumably the spec is patent-encumbered specifically to prevent this type of "attack".
You also wouldn't have any rights to use any HDMI-related trademarks.
https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/how-compaqs-clone-comp...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean-room_design
The courts said that was fine, and whenever that happens, lawyers are going to tell people to do it exactly like that since it's a known-good way to do it, whereas some other way is maybe and who wants a maybe if you have the option to lockstep the process that was previously approved?
Of course, if you do it a different way and then that gets approved, things change. But only after somebody actually goes to court over it, which generally nobody enjoys, not least because the outcome is uncertain.
This is why government regulations often create perverse incentives and unintended consequences. You can't just consider what the rule says, you have to consider how people are going to respond to it.
This is why e.g. the DMCA takedown process is widely abused. Do corporations have to execute obviously invalid takedown requests? Maybe not. Are most of them going to, when the consequence of doing it is harm to powerless third party individuals and the consequence of not doing it is potential liability for the corporation? Yup.
Basically a week-end project...
It worked out pretty okay for DVD Jon but I imagine it was a little scary for his dad and brother at the time.
What if you crowd sourced not 100s but 1000s of Claude subscriptions. That's where the power is. You just give them a task and they just finish it for you. That's how things are done now.
Hard problem? Throw 50000s Claude subscriptions and it will kneel in front of you. Unstoppable. 50000s Claude subscriptions not enough, throw 10000000 subscriptions at it and problem solved. That's how it all works, we know this is the way to do things. Everybody knows you take a problem and throw more Claudes at it and that's it.
For example, we can do anything we want, we just need more Claude subscriptions. I couldn't do something the other day, the problem is I didn't have enough Claudes.
We just need an order of magnitude more Claude subscriptions to figure out cold fusion and unify general relativity with quantum interpretation of the world. Can you imagine what 10E10 Claude subscriptions would do with that problem? Problem stands no chance.
It is so annoying people think this is future, that this is analysis. Despicable.