If you discovered a device driver was malfunctioning and published a fix, you might assume the manufacturer of the product would be grateful. In very public fashion though, Creative Labs in the last few weeks has made it loud and clear that users who tinker with their drivers risk being shouted down. As far as Creative is concerned, it's not for you the user to decide how badly your Sound Blaster card will or will not function.

As he described in an e-mail to Wired.com, user Daniel Kawakami was angry when he discovered that Sound Blaster X-Fi soundcards -- advertised as being Vista-compatible -- actually had many features deliberately turned off. "Creative purposely modified the Audigy drivers to disable some features when Vista is detected and also purposely introduced some bugs to prevent some XP utilities from running," he wrote. "I did a complete analysis of the driver to determine where all the checks and bugs were introduced and started modding."

Kawakami began posting his modified drivers on Creative's forums, much to the delight of other Sound Blaster customers who had thought Vista drivers were just buggy. But Creative Lab was not nearly so happy, sending him a stern warning to cease and desist:

"We are aware that you have been assisting owners of our Creative sound cards for some time now, by providing unofficial driver packages for Vista that deliver more of the original functionality that was found in the equivalent XP packages for those sound cards," a Creative Labs VP wrote Kawakami. "In principle we don't have a problem with you helping users in this way, so long as they understand that any driver packages you supply are not supported by Creative. Where we do have a problem is when technology and IP owned by Creative or other companies that Creative has licensed from, are made to run on other products for which they are not intended. We took action to remove your thread because, like you, Creative and its technology partners think it is only fair to be compensated for goods and services. The difference in this case is that we own the rights to the materials that you are distributing. By enabling our technology and IP to run on sound cards for which it was not originally offered or intended, you are in effect, stealing our goods. When you solicit donations for providing packages like this, you are profiting from something that you do not own. If we choose to develop and provide host-based processing features with certain sound cards and not others, that is a business decision that only we have the right to make."

Not surprisingly, users on the Creative forums went nuts when they saw this. Why would a company intentionally withhold features - features that were actually there and worked under XP? The only reason anybody could see was that Creative must be planning to charge extra for access to those features in the future.

As the outrage mounted, Creative backpedaled somewhat. "Creative's message posted on our behalf by our Company spokesperson tried to address our concern about the improper distribution of certain software which is the property of other companies," another Creative spokesperson posted in their forums last week. "However, we did not make it as clear as we would have liked that we do support driver development by independent third parties ... Outside developers have been very helpful to Creative and our customers by developing updates for many of our Sound Blaster products, and we do support and appreciate these efforts. This however does not extend to the unauthorized distribution of other companies' property."

This semi-apology seems to have been Creative's last word on the subject, and it totally ignored the issue of why Creative had crippled its soundcards' functionality under Vista in the first place. Some observers have said that, however questionable its motives, Creative is within its rights to withhold whichever features it wants. After all, they are hardly the first (remember Roxio, for example) to get creative with their definition of what Vista compatibility means. And, since their driver software apparently comes with the standard EULA prohibitions against reverse engineering, they have the right to keep Kawakami or anyone else from fixing their broken software.

But I think those points are at least open to debate. While it is sadly true that a few of our courts have upheld reverse engineering prohibitions in sneakwrap licenses, ultimately they will have to recognize that such clauses are intolerably anti-consumer and anti-competitive. (Kawakami himself is in Brazil, where for all we know the laws and courts may already be more sophisticated in this regard than they are here.) And does any company really have the right to prevent a customer from modifying a product to make it work as advertised, or prevent them from telling others how to do so?

What is not debatable is that Creative has irredeemably broken faith with its core customers. "So many if not most Sound Blaster customers have traditionally been audiophiles, technically savvy buyers willing to pay for a superior product," one reader wrote me. "When this kind of customer finds out that a vendor who they trusted was intentionally disabling the drives, and more importantly, not being honest about it, that trust in a premium vendor is forever broken."

What do you think - is Creative Labs within its prerogatives here, or is it completely out of bounds? Post your comments below or write Ed Foster at Foster@gripe2ed.com.

Posted by Ed Foster on April 11, 2008 12:10 AM