[bitwize]

No, technically the third-party manufacturers were in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a federal offense with penalties up to five years in prison. From Philips' perspective, refusing to cooperate with those criminally infringing their IP is a feature, not a bug.

[bjt]

This is wrong on a couple levels.

1. The protocol is open. It's not Philips' IP.

2. Even if the protocol were closed, and Philips put some DRM on it to lock out 3rd parties from reverse engineering the protocol to make compatible bulbs, the third parties still wouldn't be in violation of the DMCA, even if they had to include small copy/pasted bits of the Philips code that are necessary for interoperability. This was the holding in the Lexmark case back in 2004.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexmark_International,_Inc._v....

[DannyBee]

Lexmark is only good law in the sixth circuit ;-)

[jhall1468]

I call BS. This is using the Zigbee standard which Phillips doesn't own. They added a proprietary layer after the fact, which blocked non-Phillips products.

Unless you care to share evidence of a DMCA violation, this sounds like you are just making this up as you go.

[detaro]

Given that the protocol is a standard by the Zigbee Alliance (Light Link), I doubt that implementing it causes a DMCA violation. Unless you are claiming all companies making compliant products stole Philips code to do so?

[chc]

That's an interesting accusation. What part of the DMCA were they violating?