James Delahunty
2 Apr 2008 0:14
As many of you surely have been following this story, which has been posted to nearly every user-driven link-sharing service, Creative Labs appeared to threaten a third-party driver developer over homebrew drivers. The drivers were made to address many problems that Creative's hardware has with the Windows Vista operating system, and have received praise from owners of Creative products.
However, in a forum thread on Monday, a representative for Creative appeared to sort of threaten the user, Daniel_K, over the distribution of the drivers after several of his posts were deleted. Since then, the original post (made by Dale-CL) has been edited to address a large amount of negative feedback (large meaning 242 pages at time of writing).
"We own the rights to the materials that you are distributing. By enabling our technology and IP to run on soundcards for which it was not originally offered or intended, you are, in effect, stealing our goods," the original post read. "To be clear, we are asking you to respect our legal rights in this matter and cease all further unauthorized distribution of our technology and IP."
In response, Daniel_K posted: "I do know what is right, so I'll stop developing and distributing Creative softwares and drivers." He however added that the, "funny thing is that you are faster "protecting" your technologies and intellectual properties than providing improved drivers and softwares for your customers."
Since this forum thread made it to the front pages of the likes of Digg.com, it sparked an alarming amount of negative feedback which in turn, led to the first post bring altered.
See the thread at:
http://forums.creative.com/