- cross-posted to:
- steamdeck@sopuli.xyz
- hardware@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- steamdeck@sopuli.xyz
- hardware@lemmy.world
Valve tells Ars its “trying to unblock” limits caused by open source driver issues.
Valve tells Ars its “trying to unblock” limits caused by open source driver issues.
How, though? I’m not terribly knowledgeable about the law, but I know interoperability is one of the major sources of exceptions to copyright protection, and the whole Google vs Oracle saga would imply there’s nothing illegal about making your own implementation of a standard without permission.
AMD is a member of the HDMI consortium and is probably bound by private agreements to not make open source drivers without permission from the consortium. They did try to get them to budge but they didn’t.
Copyright, patent, trademark, and trade secret laws are all entirely different and have almost nothing to do with each other (don’t be fooled by the property-rights-hating shysters who try to gaslight you into lumping them all as “intellectual property[sic]”).
Trademarks and patents don’t have the same kinds of interoperability exceptions that copyright does, and you can’t claim to “support HDMI™” without licensing rights to those in addition to whatever copyrighted code you might need for the software side of the implementation.
So what stops them from supporting HDMI™ 2.1 but just not call it that? As long as they create the code in a clean room scenario I don’t see how they could be liable for damages? Although I assume it has something to with DRM… And then you get into the weeds of the terrible cyber security laws…