Creative Labs vs Daniel_K

Zaccix · Mar 30, 2008

This story seems to be spreading like wildfire at the moment. From Slashdot:

"Since the release of Windows Vista, Creative has promised their Sound Cards as being 'Vista Ready'. Unfortunately, as many unlucky customers did discover, this is not true. What the users actually found were buggy, feature crippled drivers. Creative insisted that features such as Decoding of Dolby® Digital and DTS(TM) signals and DVD-Audio which worked fine in WinXP, would not work on windows Vista. With Creative releasing less than one new driver a year, things seemed bleak. Fortunately, a talented user, Daniel_K, was recently able to 'fix' many of the drivers, enabling the incompatible features and also fixing many bugs. Just today Creative has decided to put a stop to this. They removed all links to his modified drivers, and banned several users who were posting links to the now banned drivers."

Creative is currently under an estimated five tons of squidgy brown stuff over this. Daniel_K came along and helped out loads of people with Creative sound cards under Vista, giving them back things that worked under XP, and Creative gives him the backhand. The forum thread that kicked all this off is here if anyone wants to have a look.

The_Numberless · Mar 30, 2008

Reading their warning to him, I wish I could say I am shocked, but I've had a close friend sued over a community service and Intellectual Property rights disputes, and these large companies are PR-retarded, but fiscally cut-throat.

I just wish I could be shocked.

It's like. Really. Did someone get wind of him making functioning drivers and say "oh no, someone made our products work, and betrayed the model of planned obsilesence?"

I sigh.

BobTheBeheader · Mar 30, 2008

Wow. nVidia certainly doesn't seem to mind people modifying their drivers, I'm using modded ones right now.

If I were Creative and it were up to me, I'd hire the guy

Message to Creative: Get the stick out of your ass.

Nemephosis · Mar 30, 2008

They've got a point, it says right in the EULA's of things like this that you won't disassemble, reverse-engineer, etc. People should really try reading these things some day and realize you can't just do whatever you please.

He should be so lucky he isn't being sued, cause that'd definitely be a case he would lose.

Twisted Metal · Mar 30, 2008

Yeah even though it's "not cool," Creative still has the right to do what they did because daniel_k went against the EULA and even started to accept payments in the form of donations for his modified drivers. You NEVER accept payments for another companies work, unless you wrote the driver from scratch.

ilkman · Mar 30, 2008

Also, if I read the notice correctly his drivers, that he reverse engineered from Creative, were adding functionality from other sound companies onto Creative cards, functionality that Creative did not legally have the license for. Or he was adding Creative functionality to other companies products.

In any case thats all illegal.

Its sad that it had to come to this, but its all within Creatives rights to ask him to stop.

I think a lot of people on the internet have this misconception that since the internet is not regulated that people can do whatever they want with whatever and any form of trying to stop that is heinous and evil. I was reading a lot of the comments from other Creative users on their message boards regarding this driver issue and a lot of them need to realize that they can't do whatever they want with someone else's property/patents/technology/whatever, which is what those drivers are.

T2A` · Mar 30, 2008

EULAs are crap. Daniel_K is awesome. Creative is dumb. Donations are NOT payment and cannot be classified in the same way!

It's a shame Creative seemingly have a lock on the sound card business. I mean, they might not, but no other company comes to mind when I think about sound cards. Sure, Realtek has on-board stuff, but as for actual cards, I can't think of anything else. I do remember one I saw some time in the past, but IIRC they only sold modified Creative cards. D:

Big-Al · Mar 30, 2008

sad day for Creative

i agree with BobTheBeheader, creative should hire this Daniel_K guy

Zaccix · Mar 30, 2008

T2A` said:
EULAs are crap. Daniel_K is awesome. Creative is dumb. Donations are NOT payment and cannot be classified in the same way!

It's a shame Creative seemingly have a lock on the sound card business. I mean, they might not, but no other company comes to mind when I think about sound cards. Sure, Realtek has on-board stuff, but as for actual cards, I can't think of anything else. I do remember one I saw some time in the past, but IIRC they only sold modified Creative cards. D:

Well, there's the Auzentech X-Plosion and (now discontinued) X-Meridian, the Asus Xonar D2 (PCI) and D2X (PCI-E) cards, and M-Audio's cards. At the budget end comes Terratec (they used to have a whole range of cards; I wonder what happened).

There's probably quite a few I haven't mentioned. None of those cards can do EAX as well as a Creative card, because EAX is Creative's tech and they're keeping EAX 3, 4 and 5 to themselves for now. However, those cards do everything else, like movies and music, pretty well.

Jackal · Mar 30, 2008

T2A` said:
EULAs are crap. Daniel_K is awesome. Creative is dumb. Donations are NOT payment and cannot be classified in the same way!

100% correct. **** all that legal jargon bull****. If you were a customer who bought a card and nothing worked, you'd be pretty pissed off and then find out that a cool guy, of his own will fixed the card that you bought, then find out that Creative are stupid *******s and ruin your hope's of a card that will work correctly.

In other words, I fully support what David_K and others like him do.

Nemephosis · Mar 30, 2008

Jackal said:
100% correct. **** all that legal jargon bull****. If you were a customer who bought a card and nothing worked, you'd be pretty pissed off and then find out that a cool guy, of his own will fixed the card that you bought, then find out that Creative are stupid *******s and ruin your hope's of a card that will work correctly.

In other words, I fully support what David_K and others like him do.

Yeah, you support him so much that you don't even know the name of the guy you're supporting.

Doesn't change the fact that it's illegal.

Jackal · Mar 30, 2008

haha I just noticed that too

Crotale · Mar 30, 2008

Just because EULA's have been challenged in court and may or may not have withstood their creditability (no, not credibility) as such does not give any person the right or allowance to reverse engineer or re-engineer a companies copyrighted software. Sorry for those of you who think it does, but you are wrong. I would bet that if this were to go to the courts, it would be highly unlikely that Creative would lose on this one.

It might be different if this guy created a piece of middleware that bridged support for the Creative cards with Vista, but he actually modified their software. Creative has every right to nail this guy, no matter how good intentions were. Simply put, you don't walk into another man's house uninvited and rearrange his furniture without expecting him to be a bit perturbed about the fact that you entered his home without his permission.

haslo · Mar 30, 2008

Aye, it's illegal, and he certainly shouldn't have put up a "donations plox" button to go with it. The proper way to go about this would've been to approach Creative and ask them if they could distribute drivers with the fixes he added to make them work in Vista.

Either way though, their lack of proper support for Vista coupled with the fact that they chose this venue when actual drivers for Vista surfaced due to an individual's effort doesn't really speak for the user-friendliness of Creative's top management. The best way they could go about this is hiring the guy and letting him work on their drivers - he obviously has talent when it comes to making them work

The X-Fi on XP still is an awesome sound card, but I'd probably have gone with the Razer Barracuda instead if this'd have happened before (in fact, I was considering that one anyway)...

Kantham · Mar 30, 2008

Fortunately, a talented user, Daniel_K, was recently able to 'fix' many of the drivers, enabling the incompatible features and also fixing many bugs. Just today Creative has decided to put a stop to this. They removed all links to his modified drivers, and banned several users who were posting links to the now banned drivers."

Man, remind me to never buy a ****ing creative product again. I always had issues with my audigy anyway.

haslo said:
Aye, it's illegal, and he certainly shouldn't have put up a "donations plox" button to go with it. The proper way to go about this would've been to approach Creative and ask them if they could distribute drivers with the fixes he added to make them work in Vista.

True, but still, a non-paid user was able to fix issues that the company seems to fail about. Which is unacceptable. Someone probably wanted to buy a Creative product for their vista because of his drivers.

haslo · Mar 30, 2008

Kantham said:
True, but still, a non-paid user was able to fix issues that the company seems to fail about. Which is unacceptable. Someone probably wanted to buy a Creative product for their vista because of his drivers.

Certainly

Their driver department obviously fails hard in this whole thing

Larkin · Mar 30, 2008

I actually have to side with Daniel on this one. F#ck Creative, they lied about it working correctly in Vista. Their consumers were buying something they believed worked perfectly in Vista and it didn't not that is false advertising in my book and ripping off your consumers. So for all I care Creative can go straight to hell. Sure, Daniel is breaking the law by doing this, but who other then Creative gives a rats ass.

Selerox · Mar 30, 2008

Corporate Retardness

Zaccix said:
At the budget end comes Terratec (they used to have a whole range of cards; I wonder what happened).

I got sick of my Audigy 2 and dumped it for a Terratec 5.1 a couple of years ago. Not a single bug or issue with it at all. Which is more than I can say about my Audigy...

My next card won't be a Creative. I've had nothing but problems with them. This kind of thing doesn't exactly endear me to Creative either.

Mister_Prophet · Mar 30, 2008

The moral of the story is this: If you ship something that's broken, expect repercussions.

ilkman · Mar 30, 2008

I personally am using an MAudio 5.1 card. It doesn't have any of the crackling problems my X-Fi Xtreme Music used to have. I'm not happy at all with Creative and this whole driver issue.

However, in all legality, its in their right to do what they are doing. Hopefully they'll lose enough business to realize their errors and make some changes. I remember when they used to be the best.

Creative Labs vs Daniel_K

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