The open-source project reportedly violates Synaptics' patents, but its creator begs to differ.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works .
The story began in July 2026, when Lothian reached out to Łukasz Spintzyk, a software engineer working at Synaptics, to help solve a few bugs he’s been encountering. However, Michal Lukaszek, the Strategic Engineering Partnerships Lead at the company, replied a couple of weeks later, saying that the company is concerned that Lothian is attempting to implement the DisplayLink protocol itself, which is a violation of its patents. This resulted in a cease-and-desist letter from Synaptics’ legal department asking him to take down the Vino GitHub repo, among other things.
Synaptics claims that Lothian’s work infringes on two patents: GB2484736 and GB2485613. The former, called Image generation, is about sending screen updates over a general-purpose data network like USB or Ethernet using a specific architecture and compression method, while the latter, called Display control device, details hardware that works with compressed data and only decompresses it as needed. Lothian responded, asking for complete details as to how his work infringes on its patents, but received no response, prompting him to follow up three weeks later.
This was when Synaptics decided to escalate, telling him that it would be billing Lothian “to recoup the cost and effort required to create such documentation of your infringing acts.” Andrew Bateman, the company’s Assistant General Counsel, also added, “By open sourcing our DisplayLink technology for whatever personal reasons you may have as a ‘hobbyist,’ you will be single-handedly eviscerating DisplayLink's competitive advantage in this crowded market by educating our competitors and other third parties as to how we implement our proprietary technology, which we have gone to great lengths and great expense to prevent.”
“If you'd like to notify the media or otherwise publicize our response, I encourage you to do so. We welcome any and all free publicity to let the world (in particular, our competitors and our shareholders) know that Synaptics aggressively defends and protects its DisplayLink IP from all threats of infringement.”
Anthropic's Claude AI blocks video game cloning and reverse-engineering
Key considerations
- Investor positioning can change fast
- Volatility remains possible near catalysts
- Macro rates and liquidity can dominate flows
Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/peripherals/docking-stations-hubs/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/peripherals/docking-stations-hubs/synaptics-sends-cease-and-desist-order-to-creator-of-open-source-displaylink-driver-dares-him-to-publicize-its-threats-dev-reverse-engineers-displaylink-using-claude-ai-and-rust-synaptics-threatens-to-bill-creator-for-legal-documentation#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com/membership
- Chinese AI lab Moonshot reportedly looked at European data centers to access Nvidia chips, report claims
- This week in Tom's Hardware Premium: November 7, 2026
- Thin, Light and Built for Everything: NVIDIA RTX Spark Windows Laptops Gain New Models, Agent Tools and Games
- Two Chinese companies cleared to buy banned Nvidia AI chips have empty offices and unknown addresses
- Homelabber uses second-gen Optane memory sticks to run a 2.8-trillion-parameter AI model on CPU alone
Informational only. No financial advice. Do your own research.