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.

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