d = 4D0534BA8BB2BFA0740BFB6562E843C7EC7A58AE351CE11D43438CA239DD9927
6CD125FEBAEE5D2696579FA3A3958FF4FC54C685EAA91723BC8888F292947BA1
which can be used to sign firmware for the TI-83+. This lead to the creation of the Wikipedia "black lock" on articles, meaning they can't be edited because of internal Wikipedia corporate policy, which didn't previously exist.
Any piece of data can be represented as a single number. In the limit your entire computer is a single number (all those 0s and 1s can either be interpreted as separate numbers or as one gigantic number).
If any data is ever illegal then by association certain numbers are also illegal.
Not really. We've decided as a society that information can be illegal. Whether that information is encrypted, obfuscated, or whatever, it is still illegal. Everything is a number if you abstract it enough and any number can be transformed into any other number easily. As long as it can be shown that the numbers you're publishing are intentionally being published for the purpose of providing illegal information, you're breaking the law.
The legal system is not like a computer system and tech people who think they can fool it with simple tricks like it was a computer system are in for an unpleasant surprise.
Just wait till GAN neural networks are more wide spread and refined. Is someone liable for copyright violation if their GAN neural network was trained on copyrighted images? The a refined version of the resulting GAN model can be used in reverse to generate false convincing variations of the original copyrighted media. Is anyone liable?
If it goes the same way as the rest of the internet, we’ll be in a situation where they’re illegal, but large “too big to fail” companies will be exempt from the law.
(For examples of what I mean, see any copyright dispute involving YouTube, Dropbox, etc. or the repercussions of illegal content on pornhub vs. Facebook.)
Should not be different than a human artist producing something after looking at other media. The purpose of copyright is supposed to be to allow people to profit from their works by prohibiting their distribution by others. It seems to me the question of whether one work is a copy of another would be made on the basis of the works themselves, and should be independent of who the artists were. There is also a right to parody, and no inherent reason parody can't be produced in an automated fashion.
In the eyes of the law it might not be different, but in the practical upshot it is. Running the program may well produce a copyright-violating image, and you'd never know. An artist would have a much harder time doing that without knowing he was doing it. So then somebody sues you for using their copyrighted work and shows you their original, and you're left scratching your head, pointing at the computer.
If you put copyrighted works into the NN training data then only copyrighted works will come out. The NN itself would be a derivative work and a copyright violation as well without the appropriate licenses.
If you don't put copyrighted works into the NN but then feed a copyrighted work to it as an input the result is still copyrighted.
I really don't find this that complicated. NN's having a license that is a composite of the software license and the licenses of the training data feels super natural.
> The NN itself would be a derivative work and a copyright violation as well without the appropriate licenses.
This seems reasonable at first, but not the more I think about it. Copyright is not like an AGPL software license that claims/poisons everything it touches.
The NN is not an artistic work and probably should not be considered a derivative work any more than your brain or memory of a copyrighted work should be considered a derivative work. Likewise, the outputted work of a NN is not automatically a derivative work any more than the work of an artist that has been inspired by other artists' copyrighted content is. That's just not how copyright works.
> Copyright is not like an AGPL software license that claims/poisons everything it touches.
Obviously, it is, since the only mechanism copyleft licenses have to claim/poison things the licensed material “touches” is the copyright doctrine of derivative works, and the licensable exclusive rights the original work’s copyright owner has to create derivative works.
I don't think that's quite right. They can prohibit your use of the program unless you agree to and follow the rules they establish. They are able to do that prohibition using copyright, but isn't it proof that copyright doesn't necessarily do that the fact that there are other very different licenses?
Copyright, by default, is not at all permissive. Every license (including viral ones) are more permissive than the legal default standing, not less.
This is why one company I worked for refused to let us use Webpack 1.x- a dependency of a dependency was an ancient npm module from the time that adding licenses to modules wasn't very common. It wasnt until the 2.x line came out that they finally updated to a version that updated to a version that didn't have that problem.
Yet my comparison of the human brain still stands, I believe.
Just because you learned about something in art class from looking at a copyrighted work doesn’t make everything you produce after that a derivative work.
I would assume most judges would view this akin to ignoring the DMCA request. It would be like altering a single bit in an MP3 and saying that it's no longer the exact original, even though you put out instructions telling the downloader to change the bit back.
Using copyright tools to try to contain published documentation of facts about anything is roughly where, if possible, I boycott anything involved with that company to the maximum reasonable extent.
It is clear that TI no longer has an interest in developing new products, or figuring out better ways of making existing products, and would instead like to rent-seek and make the world a smaller place.
That was clear when Nokia fell and took down TI's OMAP processors with them and they just gave up to Quallcomm's Snapdragon without even putting up a fight.
TI is now just rentseeking on their ananlog dominance and whatever sinking boat Intel is, TI is way worse.
TI have some sweet analogue products with very high performance and (just as importantly) excellent documentation. For example I've been very happy with https://www.ti.com/product/TPS61098 If you're not trying to shave every cent off BOM costs, it's worth paying a premium for high quality datasheets.
TI might not be focused on phones and multimedia devices anymore, but their DSP chips are extremely well regarded, and some of their other chips are popular for industrial automation.
I don’t think “rentseeking on their analog dominance” is a fair characterization.
It's hard not to view this sort of stuff as saber rattling (or, more accurately, whining) from the OSHW community.
TI is more than happy to work with you on their most cutting edge designs if you're shipping in appreciable volume. Talking a quarter million chips or more per year. That's just the way the wind blows in their business. Gotta recoup as much R&D expenditure as possible up front. I've worked with them on these sorts of designs. They employ tons of really sharp engineers and still make lots of high quality, very useful chips. You just have to buy enough of them for it to be worth it for TI to work with you.
No OSHW application I know of has ever moved enough units to cross this bar. Not even close.
I can understand hardware vendors not actively working with you on designs unless you're buying in volume. That's fine, they're a business, they have to make money and not lose money.
What I don't understand about the hardware industry is the extent to which they actively restrict access to information on how their product works unless you're buying in volume. Why is it necessary to have layers of NDAs on a product datasheet? Many of the people who might write software to integrate with some hardware are not the people manufacturing high-volume products based on it! (See: Linux driver developers.)
Why is it necessary to have layers of NDAs on a product datasheet? Many of the people who might write software to integrate with some hardware are not the people manufacturing high-volume products based on it!
Because obscuring the use case and the customer of a cutting edge chip is a semiconductor company's most reasonable moat these days. If you telegraph what big customers are buying by freely sharing your most cutting edge product portfolio, someone else will copy it. (Probably someone in China with a hefty dose of subsidy from the gov't.) Classic case of "Your margin is my opportunity."
ADI or On Semi can, and will, catch TI after 18-36 months of development effort. The longer TI can keep them off their tail by making it hard to see what customers are buying, the more profit they can make without a reasonable competitor on the market.
Software is a commodity that TI distributes as a compliment to the thing that actually makes them money, which is selling chips. For analog circuits, this is completely irrelevant, and doesn't affect their operating procedure. For processors and peripherals that require drivers, it's a cost of doing business for them - not an enabling feature.
>Software is a commodity that TI distributes as a compliment to the thing that actually makes them money, which is selling chips. ... For processors and peripherals that require drivers, it's a cost of doing business for them - not an enabling feature.
It's a cost of doing business that would be ameliorated by telling people how to use the product, because then they're not the only ones able to do the work. I'll use Linux drivers again as an example: I can only imagine the money it must cost for these SoC manufacturers to keep their kernel forks with binary blob drivers up to date with mainline Linux, and the security vulnerabilities that go unpatched in their products when they don't. That's money that Intel and AMD just don't have to spend; they contribute to the kernel, yes, but they're far from the only ones doing the work.
It's a cost of doing business that would be ameliorated by telling people how to use the product, because then they're not the only ones able to do the work
...if you're talking about processors, sure. But only talking about processors gives a really narrow view of TI's business, and doesn't add any context into why they sell the way they do. They make a ton of money on analog applications that require no OSSW support at all. They know how to sell chips that way - they've been doing it for fifty plus years. They are an analog company that didn't get into the processor business until comparatively recently.
I'm sure a bunch of this cloak and dagger around datasheets is legacy holdover from an analog sales world. They know what they are doing in that department, without doubt.
As to why they're DMCA'ing someone for a 50 year old datasheet - I'd guess it's as simple an explanation as someone in Legal carrying out their boss's mandate. Nothing more, nothing less.
The big customers are the only ones who matter. They are all like this. The DMCA would have been the pearl clutching lawyers. I used to think it was short sighted but I'm not so sure anymore, I think they could all be better to their customers and their firmware examples etc could be multiple orders of magnitude better and it wouldn't hurt the bottom line.
The datasheets are under NDA because they give each volume customer a different datasheet. You go to a sales call and say you want X, and then their engineering department prepares a datasheet saying that their product supports X. (Obviously the hardware supports X, but it may be kind of broken, so it's easier to tell customers that don't ask for it by name that it's not there.)
Alternatively, some customer pays an absurd amount of money to add Function X to the chip, and pays a premium to be the only customer who can use Function X.
That’s always weird to me. Other companies do the same by hiding specs and documentation from people who aren’t paying big money. I always thought it was supposed to be better to spread your information as widely as possible so people can familiarize themselves with your product resulting in potential future sales.
I always thought it was supposed to be better to spread your information as widely as possible so people can familiarize themselves with your product resulting in potential future sales.
That makes a lot of sense - if you're building a software platform.
If you're building a chip, it makes sense to be the first mover on the cutting edge. By obscuring specs, your competitors won't know what specs are the most valuable to your customers. That sort of thing is critically important to semiconductor business.
What makes you think it's the OSHW community? If TI will work with you only if you're high vol then I could see a lot of smaller businesses seeing this tactic working against them too.
In TI's eyes - that is, through the lens of order volume and support needed by the customer from TI - the difference between a single small business building HW and a single OSHW is negligible.
They get way more ROI by heavily supporting bigCos who will give them millions of dollars of business YOY rather than helping a zillion mom and pop shops who can barely wire a resistor the right way.
Think of it as a tacit strategy of "firing your worst customers". Having worked in bigCo vs small Co, there are a lot of small Co and OSHW EEs who barely have a clue what they're doing. It's not worth TI's time or money to help these people out. Upleveling lousy engineers thru support only to net them a 10 piece part order, is a really lousy ROI. (Unless of course we're talking an ASIC or some other astronomically high ROI custom piece. But, I'm assuming that we're not, because I don't work for a military prime contractor.)
They made a conscious decision to focus their efforts on where they're able to be a leader. They saw early on that they couldn't compete in advanced logic with the Asian foundries without making astronomical investments -- so they decided to compete in a non-feature size dominated market.
> TI is now just rentseeking on their ananlog dominance and whatever sinking boat Intel is, TI is way worse.
Burr Brown opamps and DSPs are enough to keep the legacy of TI alive. OMAPs are just DSPs with processor cores. They were not designed to be fast first.
Nokia's Bell Labs is only focused on 5G and 6G technologies. I mean judging by the papers they release they are now a far cry from the wide research spectrum that they had before.
I remember the "golden age" of chip makers in the 80s giving a bookshelf of datasheets to every engineer who asked. (At the time, if you mailed a circuit design to an inside rep, he would also mail you all the chips for free to build it, regardless of price.)
Since then, some mfgs. have been restricting datasheets to avoid potential patent litigation.
This might be the case here. Possibly another example of death by a thousand cuts as our society gets more regimented.
Computers in the 80s also came with schematics that showed users how to repair, modify and extend their system. I've seen videos of people hooking up their electronics projects to a C64.
Cool, I was just going to use a TPA series amplifier for my commercial design this year. I'm just going to switch to ST Microelectronics which is what Bose et al use anyway. Good riddance. If you are stupid enough to DMCA 555 timer datasheets, you just shot yourself in the foot.
Good choice on ST. I can only recommend their products. While some tools are still wonky and quite archaic (which is sadly pretty much the standard in the industry) their tools are the lesser bad ones.
Being located in France ST is having a lot of personal issues right now. Lots of ST parts are getting hard to get so make sure you can get it. The ones you can get are going up in price.
I don’t understand why chipmakers seem to always restrict access to documentation on chips. Their competitors will get it anyway. This only creates more problems for small developers.
Could it be a legacy culture thing?
If you’ve ever dealt with traditional broadcast vendors it’s the same thing there, impossible to get even basic documentation and manuals without having an authorized account in most cases.
Really is frustrating when you try to shop around for a new setup and all you can get is marketing material.
On the contrary, this is not legacy, it is a new fashion.
The electronics and computers industries have been built initially based on free detailed documentation from all the manufacturers of components.
When I was a student in electronics, I learned more from datasheets and application notes than from most university manuals.
All companies continued to provide good technical documentation until close to the year 2000.
With the growth of the Internet I believed that it will become easier than ever to get technical documentation, as it could be now downloaded instead of having to get printed copies.
Unfortunately, at the end of the nineties a lot of negative tendencies have appeared. Many large electronics companies with decades of successful histories were split (e.g. Motorola, Siemens, Philips and others) and their successors seem to have lost most of their previous experience.
A large number of other electronics companies have started a descending evolution and, sooner or later, between 2000 and 2020, they were bought by competitors, so now only a handful of US non-fabless manufacturers of semiconductor devices have survived.
At the same time the incomprehensible fashion of requiring Non-Disclosure Agreements for getting the complete datasheets or even any datasheets has become more and more widespread.
This policy of the NDA has been conceived by morons who have not the slightest idea about how an electronics product is designed.
Whenever I design a new product, I need first to be able to read all the datasheets of all the products that might have even an extremely remote chance to be useful, to decide and select what I could use.
I will not bother to sign an NDA to learn about products that might be not useful at all for me.
The only positive effect that the NDA may have for a producer is that it might prevent the already existing customers to redesign their products, because they might not bother to obtain similar NDA from other vendors. On the other hand requesting NDA's will deter many potential new customers, especially due to the insistence on providing an estimated sales volume, before signing the NDA.
That is stupid, because before seeing the information under NDA I have no idea if I would ever want to buy 1 sample, much less 1 million pieces per year.
Managers seem much happier about NDA's than designers, because they frequently feel like they are some sort of special bond with the vendor and the information under NDA provides some sort of competitive advantage, but that is extremely far from the truth.
In most cases the only valuable information contained in the datasheets under NDA was about horrible bugs that required complex workarounds. If I had known about the bugs before the NDA, I might have never chosen those components, so maybe that was a desirable feature of the NDA for the vendor.
The end result is that when I was young and I designed anything, I could choose any component from a large number and I could easily select the best for my specific needs. Moreover, in many cases I could find a method to use in a novel way something that was not intended for my particular application, but due to the good documentation I could understand whether it would be good for different uses.
Now there is frequently just one remaining producer for any component, or if there are more of them, you might need to choose one by lottery, because without the information under NDA you cannot know who has the product more suited for you, and you can sign the NDA only if you are already committed to buy that product and not another.
> The only positive effect that the NDA may have for a producer is that it might prevent the already existing customers to redesign their products, because they might not bother to obtain similar NDA from other vendors.
That's a positive from their competitors requiring an NDA, not for they requiring one.
Anyway, large software sellers benefit a lot from stupid procedures from their clients that create a huge cost to start buying from a new supplier (like passing all suppliers through legal or having a management vote for them). If all hardware manufacturers require NDAs, they can force their buyers into creating similar procedures, closing the market for new entrants.
Most likely. The open source movement in software was still relatively recently and quite radical. The hardware companies are still stuck way in the past.
>The hardware companies are still stuck way in the past.
If only. In the past it was common to provide schematics of your hardware in order that people could repair it. This was common for consumer products, industrial, instrumentation, test gear, almost everything. For example, the manual for the Amiga 500 had the schematics in it.
Also "hardware companies are still stuck way in the past" is only true for some hardware companies. Recently got into music production and lots of hardware comes with schematics of the inner workings with descriptions on how it all works and is connected, together with implementation guides for MIDI and more. Night and day if you compare to how computer hardware gets sold today.
I don't know if this is only with music hardware or with 'professional' hardware in general, but yeah you get a lot of schematics and such.
While I was at University I made some money by repairing DJ-hardware. Controllers, CD-Players and Turntables. There things are often expensive, but they are quite easy to repair because there are detailed service manuals available. Not on the official sites, though.
“The hardware companies are still stuck way in the past.”
You wish they were stuck in the past. People like Steve Wozniak often designed new stuff only based on the manuals that back then had complete schematics in them. They didn’t have enough money first to buy anything but that information later on resulted in sales.
>"The hardware companies are still stuck way in the past."
Example: in the past my friend bought Moog Prodigy synthesizer and along with everything it also came with all the electronic circuitry diagrams. Good luck finding anything like this with the modern hardware.
It's the same today I think. Recently bought a Moog Sirin (released in 2019, compared to Prodigy that was released in 1979[?]) that also comes with a circuit diagram. Couple of other synths I own does the same.
Last time I had to find in-depth documentation on a fairly common and new SONY image sensor, there was nothing available officially, found it in some chinese file sharing site though. Seems like they are shooting themselves in the foot by not opening it.
I think this may be some bigger market fixing situation - only big and already established corporations would get documentation preventing any competition to emerge.
Stabbing a bit in the dark, but maybe TI wants to prevent a competitor from being to say "we didn't steal anything from you, we got all this info from sites that you were perfectly happy to let continue to operate freely".
The legal departments within companies have very, very different measures of success than that of just about anyone else. If you have weak company leadership, legal will start to drive policy more than it should.
Because in semiconductor business land, not showing what your most cutting edge products are, and who's buying them, helps you develop business opportunities and product lines several years ahead of your competitors.
It's a very different game than Intel's business model, which depended on a pure performance play and being 18-36 months ahead of all competitors tech wise. TI's strategy requires way more customer contact and development, because analog applications are so much more specific.
It is to create barriers to entry where possible. If you are rent-seeking greedy co, then why would you give away useful knowledge, not to mention for free? Also good documentation could make you create a replacement product or have better understanding what to look for in a substitute.
> This only creates more problems for small developers.
This is exactly why: to stop small developers from buying them. There are three types of components in the electronics world to my observation.
1. Components for the general public (e.g. opamps, microcontrollers, power supply controllers) - the datasheets are publicly available. This is probably 70% of the marketplace.
2. Components for the OEM - Some components are only meant to be sold to OEMs in huge quantity. For example, a company may sell $1 LCD controllers, if such a company is only interested in selling to huge manufacturers for big money, they often classify their datasheets as "confidential" - it's a joke, the only purpose is stop small developers from wasting their time. Whether it's a Type-2 part heavily depends on the company. For example, a big U.S. semiconductor company may sell it to the general public, but a cheap Taiwanese vendor often classifies all the information as confidential.
3. Security through obscurity. If the chip contains unique or advanced technology, for example, the latest generation of NAND flash or SoC, the datasheet is classified to make it more difficult for other people to do market research. Similarly, the payment card and consumer DRM vendors essentially own the security chip industry, selling channels of the chip and availability of the datasheets are tightly controlled.
Type-2 and Type-3 are responsible for the most frustrating experience. If you are an independent kernel hacker who wants to port Linux to a new gadget, not being able to get the datasheet of the $1 LCD controller because it's "confidential" is a real headache.
But as I mentioned previously, Type-2 chips are not really secret - the confidentiality is only meant to stop small developers from bothering them. Thus, the chips themselves can usually be found for sale on the Shenzhen electronics marketplace, and it's often possible to find numerous leaked datasheets on the web. You can also reverse engineer consumer gadgets as a reference design. For example, Realtek Ethernet controllers, 100% of the public datasheets are leaked by insiders. If it's not, sometimes getting the datasheet may be possible you do some social engineering, "we are prototyping a new product based on the LCD controller chip, now our problem is register xxh..."
On the other hand, if it's Type-3, don't even think about it.
The vast majority of products by TI are Type-I: Usually all technical documentation is provided on the website, with schematics, PCB layouts, and reference designs (unless it's a specialized chip for a particular application). I recently used a TI chip in my design just because of the availability of documentation.
> Here is TI DMCAing a bunch of random datasheets. Completely jellybean stuff like 555s, 74xx logic, and op-amps. Nope nope nope nope. This is crazy.
These chips don't even belong to the Type-2 category. It's unreasonable to send DMCA takedown notices in terms of security-through-obscurity. The only explanation I can see is TI's overzealous corporate policies.
TI is great to work with on Type 1 chips. They're nowhere near the worst in the Type 3 category. (Looking at you, Qualcomm and Marvell.)
I totally agree that the DMCA notices issued don't make much sense, given this context. I just get irritated by OSHW folks acting like their business means something to TI. They are ants crying in the footprints of elephants.
Marketing stupidity at its highest - if they were doing their job properly they would be doing everything possible to put their data sheets in front of as many designers as possible - I'll just find someone else's part that does the job and choose that
For example Apple is known for having part suppliers to not sell parts to third parties. I wouldn't be surprised if these type of deals but more secret existed, so that big corporations can ensure there won't be any new competition coming up, as they wouldn't have the same access to parts or documentation.
never uploaded anything to libgen, but i am setting up a http mirror of this and will also provide a .zip file, to make it easy for others to download the whole collection.
posting the link here when its done, then someone else can submit this to libgen and other places.
TI has also cancelled distribution agreements with several of their top distributors recently. (Avnet, etc).
They have a few global distributors remaining, and if you talk to any of them for a new design, you'll notice they try to avoid promoting TI parts because of TI's new pricing and commission policies.
I had noticed that the UK distributors that I use on a regular basis, RS and Farnell, have stopped hosting TI's datasheets on their sites. It makes it quite annoying to make a quick check to see if the part does what I want.
Whats up at TI? They used to be great for datasheets and Appnotes.
It isn't unthinkable that some customer segments cost more to support than they generate in direct revenue - that is: are inefficient. So spending less on customers and sales channels that are inefficient may save them money.
I'm not sure that would explain them attempting to limit the availability of their datasheets though. That doesn't make much sense to anyone.
They are pretty much all the same - product links. Did google simply obey this and delist the URLs? How is this even legal.
TI recently dropped some distributers - maybe they are doing this as a way of removing 3rd party retailers under guise of copyright violations - DMCA abuse, pure and simple. Should be HEAVY penalties for this kind of crap.
The courts could (and should) render TI’s underlying copyrights unenforceable.
Sadly, the cited precedent is from 1990, and I don’t know of any more recent cases.
edit: I also just posted this as a top-level article. People in the tech community should have a broader understanding of this line of legal defense.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25686276
I'm trying to come up with an explanation why TI would do that.
The only explanation I can come up with is that TI wants a closer relationship with their customers. They don't want to be a commodity chip producer.
When distributors host the datasheets, then customers would probably never visit TIs website, and just compare chips from multiple vendors on the distributors website. Customers are just going to pick the cheapest part that matches the specs.
Maybe TI wants to be seen as a premium vendor. They don't want customers to look for a LED driver on an electronics distributors website, they want you to look for a TI LED driver on ti.com. They can explain the benefits of their chips much better on their own website.
As someone who occasionally tinkers with electronics, I think this decision by TI sucks. I like that Mouser and Reichelt host all their datasheets. But I guess TI doesn't care if I'm going to buy two LM3886s or not.
> I'm trying to come up with an explanation why TI would do that.
When I hear these kind of stories I always wonder this too. Like, who was allowed to turn this into a company policy and why on earth did they think it worth their time? Usually something that would seem to harm the public image and goodwill of the firm.
This speculation in this comment seems pretty convincing imo:
There need to be automatic steep fines for filing fraudulent DMCA requests. The process is totally asymmetrical, rampantly abused, and there is no realistic recourse for victims. In practice people rarely sue afterward, due to further asymmetries. If not an automatic $1k+ fine for false claims, we badly need some ambulance chaser style law firms who solely seek out copyright victims and charge fees only as a fraction of damages awarded.
One project I was thinking of doing was creating a database of microcontrollers from all the vendors in one place. This was actually something that crossed my mind - would I even be allowed to host datasheets? It would be impossible to get all the vendors to agree to anything and it seems like TI at least does NOT want anyone hosting their information.
In my experience (from a few large companies) I'm afraid this would accomplish exactly nothing. It is wishful thinking.
The only way to reach most companies is to turn up on their PR radar. If something is seen as potentially damaging to their brand your concern will enter the company at a place in the organization which will have a far more direct channel to someone who can make decisions.
If you go through their investor feedback channel, unless you own a fair chunk of shares in the company or represent major shareholders, they will ignore you. Of course, if you are a major investor you wouldn't contact them through that channel anyway. You would already have a relationship to someone in, or close to, top management who is responsible for handling major stakeholders.
You want to get the message through to those who are responsible. Whether it's via the Investor contact or the Press contact doesn't really matter, as long as whoever came up with this decision has to justify it in front of the other executives.
The contact-us is a box to speak into that would make you feel better that you did something when you hit 'send'. If you think you will achieve anything significant with it, think again. Imagine that _you_ are TI and you receive a couple of messages there. You will think (probably even anticipate) this is clearly the public's reaction to a decision that you thought through, which is not a typo or day-to-day error. So you will thank them for their concern and will carry on with your business!
A better remedy would be to publicly shame them about what they just did. TI will still carry on with their business but others will just know better than to engage with TI in the future!
I’m going to post the unpopular opinion here and say that this is OK in my book.
This archive is distributing out of date documentation without making it clear that it’s out of date. This could cause a major problem for someone that uses it.
The documentation for the same chip is perfectly available on TIs website, although to get older datasheets you’ll need to dig further (by design).
There’s a ton of sites mirroring datasheets, and they weren’t DMCA. It looks like someone at TIs legal got creative about how control this sites to update their info.
It's a perfect example of the general shittiness of life. Just little things that, in of themselves, aren't bad, but they add up to make everything more difficult.
Once an IC is designed, the datasheet doesn't substantially change. It isn't a computer program that gets continuous updates every couple of months. They might add some errata for some corner cases or clarification. What happens when the IC is discontinued? I still need the datasheet, so I can understand the circuit when finding a replacement IC.
The datasheets in question are from parts like 555 and logic, parts that are functionally generic. No one has a doubt about how it works, but details like timmings specification and other small print parameters have had a lot of changes, because the design has been ported along each time the manufacturing process has changed.
It’s cases like the one you mention when you want to know that the new parts have different parameters and you might need to change other components to compensate.
It's possible, and would also mean that TI didn't attempt to talk to bitsavers to get a new page added to the front of the old datasheet, which says "this is severely outdated and we have a nicer newer datasheet at ti.com - sincerely, Person McHuman, TI writer" and instead went right for takedown.
Copyright was designed to further human civilization as now become one of if not the greatest threat to the advancement of human civilization.
Copyright must be reworked,and reduced. back to AT MOST the original 14 years plus 1 extension of 14 year to the original human creator (not a company)
Failure to do this will continue to see humanity limited in our growth
p = B709D3A0CD2FEC08EAFCCF540D8A100BB38E5E091D646ADB7B14D021096FFCD
q = B7207BD184E0B5A0B89832AA68849B29EDFB03FBA2E8917B176504F08A96246CB
d = 4D0534BA8BB2BFA0740BFB6562E843C7EC7A58AE351CE11D43438CA239DD9927 6CD125FEBAEE5D2696579FA3A3958FF4FC54C685EAA91723BC8888F292947BA1
which can be used to sign firmware for the TI-83+. This lead to the creation of the Wikipedia "black lock" on articles, meaning they can't be edited because of internal Wikipedia corporate policy, which didn't previously exist.
Wikipedia eventually won the dispute, and they host the numbers here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments_signing_key_...