The Philips webcam driver - again [LWN.net]

The Philips webcam driver - again

Posted May 5, 2005 4:57 UTC (Thu) by horen (subscriber, #2514)
Parent article: The Philips webcam driver - again

by Nemosoft's admission, the non-disclosure agreement which forced the decompression code to be proprietary ran out some time ago. Nemosoft could thus resolve the licensing issues by simply releasing the decompression code under a free license.

Not exactly. The NDA entered into by Nemosoft with Philips expired a while back, but this does not give him a legal or ethical right to release Philips' proprietary code. Nemosoft could, if he so desired, ask Philips for permission to release their code and, if permission was granted, release the code. Better yet would be for Luc Saillard to make that request.

When an NDA expires, it means that the signee needs to resign/renegotiate the agreement with the vendor/developer; it certainly does not mean that the vendor/developer's rights to its proprietary code disappear. It might be nice -- it's certainly expedient to believe so -- but that's not the way it works.

I agree with Nemosoft's decisions, even though I'm a proud (albeit forlorn) owner of a Philips PCVC740K webcam. Doing the right thing isn't always popular, but it's right.

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Uhm

Posted May 5, 2005 15:32 UTC (Thu) by cartman (subscriber, #11404) [Link]

".. the decompression code consists mostly of a set of tables filled with mysterious
numbers. ...."

Have you ever seen reverse engineered audio/video codecs?

The Philips webcam driver - again

Posted May 5, 2005 22:33 UTC (Thu) by brouhaha (subscriber, #1698) [Link]

An NDA is a "Non-Disclosure Agreement". When the NDA expires, you are allowed to disclose the NDA'd material to third parties. The point of the NDA is to keep the material secret for a limited time (unless the NDA has no expiration).

Note that the expiration of an NDA does not terminate any restricted rights that result from copyrights, trademarks, or patents. Suppose I get technical documentation on the interface to a Foobarco webcam under NDA, and it includes a copyrighted Foobarco driver for Windows. Once the NDA expires I can publish my own Linux driver based on the documentation, but I can't still cannot redistribute the Foobarco copyrighted Windows driver, or a work derived directly from it, without obtaining permission.

In the US copyrights do not cover mere compilations of facts, so they probably wouldn't cover something like an array of compression coefficients.

I am not a lawyer, but I've been a party to more than a dozen NDAs, and studied them fairly carefully before signing them. However, I'd advise you to consult an attorney before taking any action.