Creative Labs Slams Door on "Fixed," User-Modded Vista Drivers

Hear it all. All about Creative and their poor Vista driver support.

I'm still a gamer, but with the amount of heat gaming PCs put out, I've switched to gaming laptops only. It's way more expensive, but at least I haven't had to experience the problems Creative Labs users have been having on Windows Vista. Drivers were buggy and feature-crippled.

User Daniel_k (Daniel Kawakami) has been modding Windows Vista drivers for Creative Labs products. While Creative Labs insisted that features such as Decoding of Dolby Digital and DTS signals and DVD-Audio which worked fine in WinXP, would not work on Vista. Daniel_K was recently able to "fix" many drivers, enabling the "incompatible" features as well as fixing many bugs.

He made a few mistakes, however, as in asking for donations. Making a profit off his modded drivers was asking for trouble.

On Friday Creative Labs put a stop to the driver modding, by posting the following on their forums, as well as removing links to his modded drivers.

Daniel_K:

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. 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.

Although you say you have discontinued your practice of distributing unauthorized software packages for Creative sound cards we have seen evidence of them elsewhere along with donation requests from you. We also note in a recent post of yours on these forums, that you appear to be contemplating the release of further packages. To be clear, we are asking you to respect our legal rights in this matter and cease all further unauthorized distribution of our technology and IP. In addition we request that you observe our forum rules and respect our right to enforce those rules. If you are in any doubt as to what we would consider unacceptable then please request clarification through one of our forum moderators before posting.

Phil O'Shaughnessy
VP Corporate Communications
Creative Labs Inc.

Some users have posited that Creative Labs has been artificially removing features; O'Shaughnessy's statement "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" seems to point to that conclusion.

As I said, Daniel_k was definitely breaking the EULA, and asking for donations probably drew Creative's ire.

However, Creative's announcement, as well as Daniel_k's indicating he was quitting the modding business drew still more ire - from Creative's customers.

For example, this one:

I am sure I am not alone when I ask this. Once and for all, we want the truth:

After your disrespectful messages to Daniel_K, will you be fixing your own drivers? Or are you going to leave it as it is?

And this one:

I'm happy to announce that by your recent actions AGAINST your customers I have decided NEVER to purchase a Creative product again. I'm also happy to say that within 30 minutes of your horrible news I've managed to convince 3 people to NOT purchase planned Creative products.

It's indeed not a lot but at least I'm doing something.

And finally:

Can we (Vista and X-Fi users) request for a refund as Creative has failed to deliver the necessary drivers and materials in order for the Sound Card to work as advertise?

I have to admit, Daniel_k has a good point in his post I linked above, one that Creative should take to heart:

The funny thing is that you are faster "protecting" your technologies and intelectual properties than providing improved drivers and softwares for your customers.

You purposedly crippled and ruined the Audigy/Live! (Emu10kx) and the Audigy LS/SE/Value/Live!24-bit (P17) drivers for Windows Vista.

This just proves you don't really care about what your customers and what people think about you.

Hey, Creative, when's the last time you looked at your stock price? Yep, $4.45 / share, down from slightly over $6 a year ago. Wonder why? Perhaps driver quality?