Autodesk Sues Open Design Alliance for Trademark Infringement

I particularly liked this comment (of Autodesk's),"Autodesk alleges both loss of reputation and monetary damages have resulted from ODA’s action.". The only organization that has ever hurt Autodesk's reputation is Autodesk itself and this action, successful or not, will drive still more nails into Autodesk's coffined reputation. You would have to be intellectually blind not to see through, and the real reasons, for this action and maybe someone should council Autodesk's management to consider the damage they will do to their reputation in the eyes of CAD users. A designer may not like being copied but he knows that to be copied is infuriating, and flattering; Autodesk should sit back on this one and capitalize on the exposure and insurance their competitors and the ODA give them by doing what they do!

There is a legitimate reason why Autodesk wants to distinguish between Autodesk-originated and ODA-originated files--Autodesk does not want to support non-Autodesk-originated files.

That having been said, it puts the burden on ODA members to prove whether or not Autodesk is doing something deliberately to compromise the performance of ODA-originated files besides just stating that they are not "TrustedDWG" files...

It may be this type of action by Autodesk that ultimately dooms them in their battle against Adobe and its de facto standard PDF file format. Whereas Adobe openly encourages third-party and rival companies -- many of them much larger than Adobe (Apple for instance) -- to produce products that in fact produce authentic PDF files, Autodesk is sending a clear and loud signal to the market of "how it would act" with DWF in the future if they could ever get DWF to penetrate and control the market to the same degree as DWG.

DWG is an "old" standard that for better or worse still means something to Autodesk. It has every right to protect its trademarks. But their filing's wording speaks volumes about how differently this company thinks about de facto file standards.

They are saying their rivals (because that is what we are talking about here) are "misleading consumers" about the origin and 'authentic' quality of DWG files. You see, to them DWG is synomous with Autodesk and AutoCAD. To misrepresent one is to mispresent the other. And perhaps they do have a good case in that.

But imagine Adobe sueing Apple because Steve Jobs told legions of Mac users during one of his keynotes that OS X can automatically produce genuine PDF files because PDF is built into the architecture of OS X. Could consumers be confused about how authentic an OS X PDF file is compared to one made with Acrobat Professional? Absolutely. Many of us Mac users were in fact not clear on this.

Is Adobe going to ever sue Apple over PDF in OS X? No.

Because Adobe's entire position with open industry standards is radically different than Autodesk's strategy.

What we see here is an illustration of how Autodesk thinks of 'de facto' standards when they are based on technology they control. Now contrast that with Adobe and PDF and ask yourself which company is acting more on the user's behalf than on its own?

In my opinion this was a trap laid by Autodesk and the ODA walked right into it. The ODA had no option but to infringe Autodesk's trademark due to the nature of the 2007 DWG file format. You can get the details on my views on this topic at www.deelip.com

In the past, AutoDESK has 'apparently' been very much behind 'interoperability' of CAD products and this requires open standards. However, my opinion is that they have manipulated the DWG standard over the years in an attempt to lock users into the latest version of their products. As an ex-AutoDESK dealer, I know the tactics they use. In fact, many years ago, they had an active policy of looking closely at AutoDESK developer's products and then copying the good ideas. Multiple scales, multi-line text, text from file.... we developed these way ahead of AutoDESK but within a year of them visiting to 'observe' our AutoCAD add-ons, the features appeared in virtually identical form within AutoCAD. How could a small company face up to a monolith like AutoDESK?

Whilst making loud noises about interoperability and its benefits, they wanted considerable fees if we incorporated DWG facilities in our own CAD system. In the end, DWG was incorporated without using any knowledge proprietary to AutoDESK. Is this an infringement of copyright - of course it isn't.

What will Dassault or PTC say if Autodesk publish tommorow that they have cracked the original CATIA, UG or Pro/E file and from now on it is possible with AutoCAD or Inventor to create original CATIA or Pro/files and nobody can identify from where this files are comming.
Do you believe PTC, Dassault or UG will give applause.
To read or to create a file is a differential thing.
We are selling CAM Software which allows to read original files from Pro/E, CATIA and so on.
Every licence we sell to our customers, they have to pay to PTC or Dassault for the integrated Kernel from them. In my opinion this is the correct way. If PTC, Dassault or UG think no, im interested to their
comments.

They are both right and both wrong in this case. The ODA should not be adding in the code to create a "Trusted DWG" file as that routine is probably copyright of Autodesk and in reality who really cares if they are opening a "Trusted DWG" or not. There are probably plenty of "Trusted DWG" files that AutoCAD's own applications create that are not 100% correct and hence the need for the Recover routines. The majority of the ODA members care more about reading, translating, and displaying DWG files then they do about writing them. So why the ODA didn't just pull the "Trusted DWG" code out and be done with it I don't understand. Why they also spent resources to crack it in the first place is another question but I'm sure it was probably because Evan wanted to show up Autodesk. The "Trusted DWG" has absolutely nothing to do with interoperability and no functions or features I know of in AutoCAD are eliminated if it's not a "Trusted DWG".

Autodesk should also realize that the reason that the DWG is still the industry standard is because all other programs out there can do a decent job of reading them in and converting them to their native format. Take that away and it's going to be just like the DWF where nobody cares about it except their own users. If the ODA was forced to stop developing the DWG toolkits I could see their companies banding together and saying let's just create a similar format that will be our interop format for all non Autodesk programs and all of other members programs could work well together.

It would be one thing if Autodesk would allow anyone to license DWG reading/writing technology but I think their Real DWG has limitations in that it can't be used for translating or viewing files or by a direct competitor or competing product.

It's also interesting that although Autodesk wants to fight the ODA they will gladly use the Microstation DGN Open Specifications to create a DGN to DWG translation. And I thought one of the reasons that DGN was made an open format was because the ODA had a DGN toolkit ready to go.

I agree with John in that Autodesk will "borrow" the ADN developers ideas but so will all the other software companies. Look at the Adobe Acrobat 8.0 batch conversion for DWG to PDF and it looks really familiar to another product that has been out for several years, just minus half the features of the other product. Also the dynamic blocks were almost identical to what Chad Wanless (ObjectDCL) had already released and was marketing. The problem is when Autodesk "borrows" these they seldom do it right and the end user gets screwed. The AutoCAD 2007 PDF output is one of these cases where it was by far the worst PDF conversion of anything out there.

Also don't think for a moment that Adobe isn't doing similar things with the PDF format. Although the PDF format is open they and only they (or a select few customers like Bentley who they approve of) can write in the digital signature required to allow markup in the free Adobe Reader. This is by far a way more monopolistic tactic to force users to use their Professional version if they want to allow the Reader Markup feature. Also they don't complain about other programs that write PDF files or about the Mac OS but as soon as Microsoft wanted to add PDF output into the next version of Office they were all over that and threatening lawsuits. I'm honestly surprised that one of the governments haven't jumped all over Adobe for this since most are standardizing on the PDF format and this forces single sourcing if they want users to be able to markup in the free Reader.

This should be a fun one to follow.

Our comment on this is on our blog at http://www.3dmojo.com/2006/11/22/shooting-blanks-at-oda-and-wounding-customers/

User of Both's comments are, in many ways, spot on but of real significance could be this one; "If the ODA was forced to stop developing the DWG toolkits I could see their companies banding together and saying let's just create a similar format that will be our interop format for all non Autodesk programs and all of other members programs could work well together."

For those of us with age on our side this is a reflection of the Microchannel vs EISA bus issue way back between IBM and the 'PC Clone' mob. (any one still using(a great product)an IBM PS2 PC?)

Upset enough of your opposition and your customers, as Autodesk has done, and you create an environment and reason for change. Autodesk's management needs a injection of commonsense and need to start considering their end-users

If I've been following the story, the suit is over the ODA libraries writing a string in the DWG file that autodesk copyrighted(copywrited?)-a string that is the key to AutoCAD authenticating the source of the file (how does it work if you wrote it from AutoCAD 12?) ODA apparently added a class to the dwgdirect libraries that could write this string.
I have some questions:
The literal string is copyrighted-meaning it can't be reproduced or distributed without permission. IF you CTRL+C; CTRL+V a dwg in windows explorer, have you just infringed on this copyright? (I'm talking about the ethical basis of the legal position, not whether Autodesk will enforce it)

If ODA provided the classes to forge the authentication, it's still the programmer who has to implement them. It may seem like a tool with only one nefarious purpose, but who's to say? Shouldn't Autodesk be going after specific counterfieters?

Is Autodesk really damaged in any way? Does anyone turn away DWGs that weren't generated by AutoCAD? Does it realy cost that much money to troubleshoot a dwg form another source? It's not a question, but Autodesk has more to fear from floppy storage destroying designs then it does from fake DWG's.

As for Autodesks, damaged reputation, I worked phone support for five years on Autodesk products. Application errors outpaced file-integrity errors 30:1. How much actual business has Autodesk lost to drawing corruption?
Now for ODA:
What was the point of hacking the Authentication string? What possible purpose could it serve but to mislead someone about the source of a file? I may never pay attention to the notice that my dwg wasn't written by AutoCAD, but I damn well worry about someone needing to forge Autodesk's signature. And if AutoCAD-written is an issue for someone I do business with, circumventing that watermark has the worst potential to destroy that relationship. It's like giving your girlfriend a fake diamond.

It looks for the time being that the courts agree with Autodesk on this one as a temporary restraining order has been placed on the ODA.

http://aecnews.com/news/2006/11/22/2117.aspx

Now I 100% agree with this as the Trusted DWG code is copyright by Autodesk and the ODA should not be imitating it.

But the ODA is going to argue that it is needed for interoperability reasons because of Autodesk's own bugs in 2007 which causes the users to not be able to completely disable the warning. If I remember correctly even if you disable the dialog box it still shows the icon down below and if batch processing through lisp you are going to end up with one icon for each drawing you open and AutoCAD does not remove them when you close it or something like that.

It's also interesting that the lawsuit is coming now that Evan Yares is no longer running the ODA as he was a very vocal figure for the ODA and probably the reason that the ODA spent the programming resources to begin with on hacking the Trusted DWG code. I'm sure it was more of an ego thing to stick it to the Autodesk Programmers that they could hack it then it was for the benefit of the member companies. If you would take a survey of the ODA member companies I bet 90% or more could care less if they could write the Trusted DWG information into the DWG.

On Autodesk's other format the DWF you are actually better off using non Autodesk DWF files as Autodesk cannot even publish a consistent DWF from all of their own applications. Each team uses different tags inside and every release is slightly different not to mention that Inventor will produce DWF files with multiple copies of the same font file which the older DWF Viewer cannot display properly.

Hopefully in the long run it will force Autodesk to fix the bugs in AutoCAD and turn off the Trusted DWG by default as most users could care less about it and the ODA will just agree to remove it and be done with it. Otherwise the only people who win are the lawyers.