Synaptics sends cease-and-desist order to creator of open-source DisplayLink driver, dares him to publicize its threats

A hobbyist building on open-source driver for DisplayLink hardware received a cease-and-desist from Synaptics, resulting in a lengthy written argument and a threat to sue from the company. According to Phoronix, the Vino driver was “clean-room reverse-engineered” and partly developed using AI and written in Rust. However, even though the person behind the open-source driver, Mike Lothian, did not break the copyright of the code behind the driver, Synaptics argued that his work violates its patent on the DisplayLink technology.

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.”

Lothian eventually took the GitHub repo containing the Vino driver offline, but it seems that the fight isn’t over yet. The hobbyist claims that Synaptics’ patents are invalid, saying, “In both cases the independent claims as filed contained no network or transport limitation. The claims were granted only after being amended to add delivery of the display data over a ‘general-purpose data network’ (and, for GB2485613, a ‘transport protocol’ with an ‘unpackaging’ step). That added feature was not new.”

He further argues that even though the company says that DisplayLink isn’t part of the Open Invention Network, Synaptics itself is an OIN licensee. Some say that an OIN license requires that any subsidiary acquired by the original licensee and all its patents would also fall under the company’s OIN license, although Synaptics apparently disagrees with this.

Despite the escalation, Lothian says that he remains open to discussing a sensible resolution. But unless the two parties come to an agreement, it looks like they’re getting ready for a legal face-off. You can see the complete email thread between Lothian and Synaptics in this Linux Kernel Mailing List page and the attached email thread (PDF).

Lothian said that he used a Claude subscription to help out with his cleanroom reverse-engineering efforts, revealing the headache that advanced AI tools pose for tech giants. A user has created a free Adobe Creative Suite clone in Rust using Claude, and was also reportedly working on an open-source office suite and Autodesk tools. Aside from that, we’ve also seen a lot of reverse-engineered games running on platforms they’re not designed for, forcing Anthropic to enforce some limitations on Opus 5.5. There was also concern that the widespread use of AI in chipmaking could result in the inadvertent spread of a copied design or an infringed patent across thousands of chips before anyone catches it.

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