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Creative, or not?
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*Note all sources are listed on the final page of this editorial.
4. Creative cracks down
On March 28 2008, Dale-CL, a moderator and employee of the Creative Corporation posted this clever comment in the Sound Blaster forums:
"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. "
"�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."
"� 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."
The Creative forums exploded. In a period of less than four days, there were thousands of posts, most were made by first time posters who got wind of the story from technology news giants like Slashdot and Digg. The community's reaction to the rebuke of Daniel_k's one man crusade to fulfill Creative's obligation to their own customers was that of a kicked puppy. Across the gaming and sound enthusiast communities, outrage was the word of the day. Creative customers felt betrayed; not only were they to be denied official support of their hardware by the manufacturer, but the one man who offered a glimmer of hope was given a cease and desist by the very company whose obligations he had attempted to fulfill. Across every spectrum of the internet, on forums whose main interest is as far away from sound cards and gaming as the dethroned planet Pluto, support for Daniel_k was almost as overwhelming as the condemnation of Creative by their own customer base. Daniel_k, in an exclusive exposé with Wired magazine, commented on the situation:
"What Creative did wrong - They publicly threatened me, just to show their arrogance. If they had contacted me by e-mail or private message I would do the same thing (remove everything) and no one would know about their insatisfaction. - Removed everything I posted in the forums, even if unrelated to the "forbidden" stuff. If they can't provide better drivers, let people make their own choice. - They did not recognize my hard work. I've been supporting about every Creative PCI sound card, would even support USB devices if I had one of them. To date, the Audigy Vista Support Pack was downloaded about 20,000 times."
Both the community and the author had spoken. The ball was squarely in Creative's court.