Trap Indeed

Owen Wengerd’s blog on the Autodesk-ODA law suit has listed the transcript of the November 22 TRO hearing. Truly worth reading. A few things caught my attention. Earlier, I had wondered whether the ODA had walked into a trap. As can be seen from the ODA lawyer’s statements below, it appears that Autodesk did indeed lay a trap for the ODA. Here are bits of what the ODA lawyer said in the court. I have edited them slightly for clarity.

The only way to disable this popup is to imitate the code so that instead of a popup coming up the message about it being a TrustedDWG product comes up. There is simply no other way that our [ODA] programmers have been able to figure out to fix it.

The difficulty is a lock-out string. What they [Autodesk] have done is encoded into their software this message that cannot be removed unless you pretend to be like it. That is why we have the problem that we have.

What we deliberately did is disabled the popup in the only way that our programmers could figure out how to do it.

Another thing caught my attention. The ODA lawyer kept insisting that Autodesk did not show any proof of tests that it had supposedly carried out showing that the ODA libraries sometimes created corrupted DWG files.

So they [Autodesk] have undertaken it [the tests]. That creates the burden of proof on them. And if they had it you can be sure that they would have produced it.

That whole issue of the testing, the cases say the burden is on them to show that they have got empirical support. I would envision that they would present some argument, some studies or something to support their underlying claims. We can respond to them.

Earlier in another article “ODA shoots itself in the foot“, I listed ODA’s release notes which clearly documented that the ODA libraries did sometimes create corrupted DWG files. I always wondered why the Autodesk lawyers didn’t use this evidence. Looks like they were not aware of it after all.