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Comment by AdmiralAsshat | Hacker News Reader

> 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." ?

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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.

"You've imposed costs on us, because of all the effort we had to go to to show that you've imposed costs on us" ??

The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy

It's not uncommon to seek legal costs in a lawsuit. They are usually judged and awarded seperately to the main claim, so it's not always loser pays. It can of course be weaponised to make the potential price of losing larger, though. A claim with unreasonably large costs is less likely to actually be granted, but often the lawyers are aiming to not get that far.

OK but it's surely not reasonable for the claim to consist entirely of legal costs? You could have avoided all of those costs by just not making the claim.

Yes, it's perfectly reasonable.

Assuming the other party is infringing your IP then it's reasonable and expected (depending on context, assuming you aren't the equivalent of a patent troll, etc) to demand that they stop. If they fail to comply then you litigate. For IP that's the case even if you don't directly suffer damages from their infringement.

Seeking reimbursement of legal expenses is also reasonable and expected (again assuming good faith).

You can "seek" legal costs all you want, but they are almost never awarded in US civil courts. (The UK is very different.) Synaptic is based in San Jose, California.

And that is also weaponized, because paying for the legal costs of disputing a frivolous or invalid claim may be prohibitively expensive, especially for individuals.

In some countries, but not in America, this is normal - you could win $1 and still whatever your lawyers cost would be added on, to incentivize the defendant to have voluntarily paid the $1 instead of forcing a court to force them to pay the $1.

It works both ways of course, if you lose a suit then you have to repay the defendant for their lawyers.

In Australia it's extremely difficult to get attorney fees covered.

and worse, even when they are "covered", the cost assessing process does not remotely cover most of your legal costs.

What!? Costs awards are the usual practice in Australian civil litigation.

That is not true at all. There is an extremely well established principle in English common law jurisdictions, including Australia that “the successful party is generally entitled to his or her costs by way of indemnity against the expense of litigation that should not, in justice, have been visited upon that party.”[1]

[1] Northern Territory v Sangare [2019] HCA 25; 265 CLR 164 at [25]

No, the “winner” does not recover their total costs. they might obtain reimbursement up to 100% for certain invoices during a costs hearing

I think here in Argentina, you recover "all" the cost but at the official rate that is less than the real rate of the lawyers.

Hongkong is very similar. The "official rates" are so pathetically low, it is like being tossed pocket change after a victory.

See the recent Dan Gelbart video on patents [1]. He explains how litigation works how to sue and how to defend.

[1] https://youtu.be/v5d8nwgiSYI

The point is that even fighting it will cost money and effort

It would sure be a shame if we all vibe coded thousands of clean-room implementations, put them all on github, and then asked Synaptics for patent guidance about each one.

I'm down to do this.

I want to do it in Brainfuck or Prolog or something silly.

Algol68, as GNU GCC recently got great support.

I'd be willing to throw in on this, at certain point it becomes about the principle of the thing, and at least for me, I've been feeling those principles yelling pretty loudly in my metaphorical ear lately.

I'm onboard with the spirit but

> vibe coded

> clean-room

Is an oxymoron. The encumbrance (or not) of AI output is still highly legally undecided.

In this case it doesn't matter. You need to swamp their patent lawyers with as much stuff that needs meticulously picked through as possible.

They don't even have to be real Synaptics drivers.

There's no way that a thinking human at Synaptic thought this was a good idea. Why would you threaten your own customers for having the gall to try to improve support for your product for free? So I can only assume that they spent $25000 on tokens to generate these threats.

> Why would you threaten your own customers for having the gall to try to improve support for your product for free?

Probably because the patent threat is just a ruse to get people to stop reverse engineering their likely insecure HDCP implementation.

Their legal team probably has its own incentives.

Use up their token allowances and get an award?

To be clear, they can send a letter that says they require delivery of one killer shark with laser beams for each day of non-compliance. They can make any insane demand, but only civil courts can decide the (monetary) penalty.

I think it would be exciting to crowd fund a civil court case against Synaptics -- the legal equivalent of: "Shields up against this bullshit!" We might even find some of those patents are incredibly weak and get them voided. In parallel, a team of devs should pick an "ideal jurisdiction" (weakest/least favorable legal environment), then use LLMs to reverse engineer their binary blob and create a fully open source driver. Publish to GitHub(+Torrent) with simple instructions to compile and install. It is possible that the Streisand effect could overwhelm them, not unlike the infamous DVD DeCSS fiasco.

Also,

> "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"

Isn't that the purpose of a patent?

This is a clown show.

You’re assuming the patent is the only thing in the code. Theres likely also trade secrets, as many pieces of secret sauce are not patentable. No one files patents on things they want as trade secrets after all.

Maybe, but I wonder how that argument would hold up in court, since they're using patent law (where what is protected is public) to make their case.

Trade secret law doesn't work that way. You can use it against an employee or business partner who signed a contract with you, or a competitor who paid off your employees to give them information. But someone finding your secrets independently is fair game.

Third party reverse engineering is never illegal for this reason. You can only violate copyright by publishing decompiled code, which is not the case with this driver. They might claim breach of contract if their EULA bans reverse engineering but that only applies to the person who entered into the agreement. If someone else decides to republish it then it's out of their hands.

Copyright never covers facts. Only patents can cover facts and they are supposed to be useful to understand. In my opinion engineers should be penalized for not reading relevant patents before building something, but in practice lawyers tell us not to because reading means we are tainted.

So if I need to write code in a specific way for the driver to work then that way is a fact not covered by copyright. There are sometimes false facts put into maps because those false facts are copyright and if found prove copyright was violated - with various levels of success that would not fit into a comment.

If the code contains trade secrets that are discoverable by anyone reverse-engineering the code, they are not secrets.

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