nvidia Nvidia's new NDA requirement for early hardware states "The recipient uses confidential information exclusively for the benefit of Nvidia"

[Athan Immortal]

1 minute ago, mr moose said:

 

I think we can all agree that some very important information has been lost in the translation.

 

The original document is in English though. And it appears to be the full thing? 

[mr moose]

4 minutes ago, Athan Immortal said:

The original document is in English though. And it appears to be the full thing? 

Hahahaha,  is that it?  they got an entire piece about misconstruing confidential material out of that?  yikes,  I'm genuinely laughing at that.  

[79wjd]

7 minutes ago, Athan Immortal said:

The original document is in English though. And it appears to be the full thing? 

Yeah let's ignore the entire body of number 3 (the first one) and just look at part of the first sentence and make nonsense claims.

 

For fuck sake.

[mr moose]

1 minute ago, djdwosk97 said:

Yeah let's ignore the entire body of number 3 (the first one) and just look at part of the first sentence and make nonsense claims.

 

For fuck sake.

A legal document with two paragraphs labeled 3?

[79wjd]

1 minute ago, mr moose said:

A legal document with two paragraphs labeled 3?

It happens. I've read through quite a few legal documents with errors.

[mr moose]

12 minutes ago, djdwosk97 said:

It happens. I've read through quite a few legal documents with errors.

is it just a generic one for generic media then?

 

In Australia missing a comma on your application can mean no gun license,  contract void, clause overruled, or case thrown out of court.

[Hunter259]

41 minutes ago, djdwosk97 said:

Yeah let's ignore the entire body of number 3 (the first one) and just look at part of the first sentence and make nonsense claims.

 

For fuck sake.

Welcome to the 21st century, where getting mad at things taken out of context is the way of life!

[Freeks]

Sooo... My first reaction to this was "wtf nvidia" but the more I read I think that this is a fairly standard NDA. Heises main problem is with the first line in 3(-1): Recipient shall use confidential Information only to the benefit of NVIDIA... And in 2 the five year runtime. I googled those passages and found similar wording from Samsung and IBM.

I'm no lawyer but it looks to me that this is just lawyer talk and not as harsh as it seems. Heise is not a bad site but they love their drama (took them 2 days to correct their not researched article about the amd security hoax) and don't fact check all the time.

In the article they write, that they check every NDA before signing them but I cant believe they never had that wording before and maybe just wanna cash in the publicity now that the new generation/card is coming out. 

[MoonSpot]

47 minutes ago, Hunter259 said:

Welcome to the 21st century, where getting mad at things taken out of context is the way of life!

'We can dance if we want to, we can leave your friends behind
Cause your friends don't dance, and if they don't dance, well they're no friends of mine'

 

Things taken literally are pretty disturbing.  Think an online/text generation might need a better way to insert inflections in their texts so they don't hate and kill each other.  There's a lot that gets lost in translation even without jumping languages.

[mr moose]

8 minutes ago, MoonSpot said:

'We can dance if we want to, we can leave your friends behind
Cause your friends don't dance and if they don't dance well they're are no friends of mine'

 

Things taken literally are pretty disturbing.  Think an online/text generation might need a better way to insert inflections in their texts so they don't hate and kill each other.  There's a lot that gets lost in translation even without jumping languages.

Just think how emoticons and emoji's may have saved many a relationship.

[laminutederire]

2 hours ago, Fetzie said:

The issue is that the NDA regarding the confidentiality is perpetual. insofar as I correctly understand Paragraph 2, a party bound by the NDA would not be allowed to report on negative findings made while reviewing a product while under NDA (even after the product is released, unless (c.f. Paragraph 3) NVIDIA says in writing that they can.

ALL information obtained with regard to a product while it is under NDA is typically considered confidential.

Issue is also the 5 years non disclosure. Let's say Nvidia tells them their product has a flaw they can't talk about it until an independent journalist talks about it and prove it to be flawed before being able to talk about it to anyone. Issue is that 5 years is way above the product lifecycle.

 

Oh an to anyone saying this is pretty standard in this industry, understand that it's maybe a problem.

[79wjd]

13 minutes ago, laminutederire said:

Issue is also the 5 years non disclosure. Let's say Nvidia tells them their product has a flaw they can't talk about it until an independent journalist talks about it and prove it to be flawed before being able to talk about it to anyone. Issue is that 5 years is way above the product lifecycle.

 

Oh an to anyone saying this is pretty standard in this industry, understand that it's maybe a problem.

So Nvidia just randomly tells a third party about a design flaw that it has no intention of divulging to anyone.....ummmm, what 

[laminutederire]

2 minutes ago, djdwosk97 said:

So Nvidia just randomly tells a third party about a design flaw that it has no intention of divulging to anyone.....ummmm, what 

It could be a flaw they don't show as a flaw but a visible flaw nonetheless.

[79wjd]

1 minute ago, laminutederire said:

It could be a flaw they don't show as a flaw but a visible flaw nonetheless.

Such as.....

[mr moose]

1 minute ago, laminutederire said:

It could be a flaw they don't show as a flaw but a visible flaw nonetheless.

Why would you think that flaw can't be included in any review? 

[laminutederire]

22 minutes ago, mr moose said:

Why would you think that flaw can't be included in any review? 

Because it doesn't benefit Nvidia.

[mr moose]

2 minutes ago, laminutederire said:

Because it doesn't benefit Nvidia.

That's for confidential information supplied by Nvidia.  Flaws discovered in a product, testing results and overall performance figures are not confidential information supplied by nvidia. These can all be made public when the NDA for said product is lifted.

 

This is all set out in the 3rd paragraph.

[laminutederire]

7 minutes ago, mr moose said:

That's for confidential information supplied by Nvidia.  Flaws discovered in a product, testing results and overall performance figures are not confidential information supplied by nvidia. These can all be made public when the NDA for said product is lifted.

 

This is all set out in the 3rd paragraph.

I'm sure they'd find a way to pressure the journalists anyway... I'm pretty sure that a review sample could come with such additional restrictions.

 

(Personally I find this industry to be one of the worse I've ever seen. So much bs to try and keep every advantage possible. That leads to a freakingly high entry barrier and we end up with a situation where the survivors aren't the fittest as the economic system would want but instead we end up with corporate claws lashing around to keep their dividend by any means necessary.)

[mr moose]

2 minutes ago, laminutederire said:

I'm sure they'd find a way to pressure the journalists anyway... I'm pretty sure that a review sample could come with such additional restrictions.

 

(Personally I find this industry to be one of the worse I've ever seen. So much bs to try and keep every advantage possible. That leads to a freakingly high entry barrier and we end up with a situation where the survivors aren't the fittest as the economic system would want but instead we end up with corporate claws lashing around to keep their dividend by any means necessary.)

Well that's now just speculation.  Any company could do anything to pressure journalists to say anything.   Doesn't make it an industry wide issue let alone an Nvidia specific one.

 

 

[kirashi]

6 hours ago, Athan Immortal said:

22.6.20(18)

Sweet! They didn't define what format the date is in, thus if I were to have my lawyer interpret the document as using ISO8601, it means that I've got until June 20th, 2022 to sign the agreement! IANAL, and I get that this isn't how the world works, but one would think that a legal department from a company as large as nVidia would have enough common sense to define some terms in an Appendix of the document. Then again, one would also think the document would actually be decently long, and not just 2 pages with duplicated paragraph numbers, making it inadmissible in court.  

[laminutederire]

2 hours ago, mr moose said:

Well that's now just speculation.  Any company could do anything to pressure journalists to say anything.   Doesn't make it an industry wide issue let alone an Nvidia specific one.

 

 

Apparently it's done extensively and frankly overdone.

You sometimes can't even go to an interview without signing nda's...

[mr moose]

1 minute ago, laminutederire said:

Apparently it's done extensively and frankly overdone.

You sometimes can't even go to an interview without signing nda's...

Yes, but the concept that they are using them to pressure journalists or reviewers is still speculation.  Sure no company wants bad reviews or bad press, and I am sure they go a long way to control it, but this 2018,  you can;t keep a secret and they know it.  Getting caught being unethical has it's consequences and unless the payoff is big enough it makes no sense to risk it.

[79wjd]

32 minutes ago, laminutederire said:

Apparently it's done extensively and frankly overdone.

You sometimes can't even go to an interview without signing nda's...

Yes, because they don't want there interview questions being leaked and thus requiring new questions. 

 

NDAs exist for very good reasons and there's nothing unreasonable about companies requiring an NDA; and there's nothing unreasonable about this NDA either. 

28 minutes ago, mr moose said:

Yes, but the concept that they are using them to pressure journalists or reviewers is still speculation.  Sure no company wants bad reviews or bad press, and I am sure they go a long way to control it, but this 2018,  you can;t keep a secret and they know it.  Getting caught being unethical has it's consequences and unless the payoff is big enough it makes no sense to risk it.

On top of that, there's no reason to explicitly say it in writing because they can very easily just cut reviewers off without having the legal ramifications of an un-enforceable/potentially illegal NDA. It's happened before when reviewers bad mouthed companies and no longer received products, or received them late, etc... 

[Freeks]

Some other german tech-sites released their statements and in short:

• They got the same NDA
• It's not an unusual NDA although non-product specific NDAs aren't THAT common
• They all signed them
• If you translate it word for word to german it can be interpreted pretty badly but it's nothing new and there never happened anything before
• Heise seems to have a "history" with Nvidia and should have communicated with Nvidia or at least other sites before publishing something that polarizing especially since it attacks other publications that signed that NDA

Sources (in german):

https://www.computerbase.de/2018-06/stellungnahme-nvidia-nda/

http://extreme.pcgameshardware.de/user-news/511519-nvidia-aktuell-verschickte-nda-mit-zweifelhaften-passagen-11.html#post9403217

https://www.tomshw.de/2018/06/26/unsere-taegliche-nvidia-news-gibt-uns-heute-vom-spekulatius-bis-zum-nda-glosse/

[EsaT]

10 hours ago, djdwosk97 said:

NDAs exist for very good reasons and there's nothing unreasonable about companies requiring an NDA; and there's nothing unreasonable about this NDA either.

Yes, they exist so that reviews etc are published only when product is ready for release (or at least considered ready enough by maker) and so that all reviewers get fair chance to publish their review at same time.

And they're usually product specific, instead of having some arbitrary five year time regardless when reviews can be published.

 

10 hours ago, mr moose said:

Getting caught being unethical has it's consequences and unless the payoff is big enough it makes no sense to risk it.

When has Nvidia had to suffer any consequencies?

I mean whole bumbgate thing of making whole serie of products with flawed design?

Showing faked Fermi half year before any actual product?

Some companies would get publicly lynched from such!

Or insane amount of tesselation on completely useless places in heavily Nvidia backed DX11 patch of Crysis 2 "accidentally" slowing AMD cards lot more to add into pile...