By Ben

I’ve been more or less on the sidelines of the modding scene for some time now. Still, I like to poke my head back in on things from time to time.

One thing in particular caught my attention as of late… there’s a company out there that’s suing a truckload of other companies over a power supply innovation: modular cabling.

What is a modular power supply? In the case modding world, the bane of everybody’s existence was cable management. It was bad enough we had wide ribbon cables going every which way, but worse then that, was power supply cables. Practically every device in your machine needed one. All of a sudden the entrails of your killer gaming rig looked like some sort of funky coloured spaghetti. Often enough the higher end power supplies had enough cables & connectors to hang an elephant, and whichever ones you didn’t use needed to be crammed in somewhere out of sight.

Enter the modular power supply. What you do is take a standard high-performance PSU, cut all the cables off it, and add in connectors that enabled you to disconnect the cables you didn’t use in your PC. This way you had only the cables you needed sticking out of the power supply, but had the option to add extra cables back in when you need them, without using those flaky Y-connectors.

Now as far as I know, this modification was originally popularized by Performance-PCs, a computer shop in Florida who started selling customized power supplies online. They would take high-end Antec supplies, replace fans and make the cables modular. Modders everywhere rejoiced.

Fast forward to 2008. As with any enthusiast base, once it becomes popular enough, you get corporate intervention.

Premodding (as the term was coined) is buying a computer case that’s already customized, so you can show off your computer’s innards without any of the elbow grease that was usually required. All of a sudden, decked-out cases with windows, switches (and more fan mounts that anybody really needed) started appearing in the likes of Future Shop and Best Buy.

Premodding did two things: It split the community between the DIY type (the pioneers in PC modding) and the group who wanted to have a kickass-looking machine but didn’t want to put the time or effort into making it truly theirs. What it also did though, was attract major competition from large manufacturers, some good, and some bad.

This rant is about the bad. Particularly, Ultra Products Inc is a company that produces just about anything related to modding has decided to take the idea of modular power supplies and keep it for themselves. With little fanfare, they managed to secure a US patent for a concept that’d been floating around the community for years. Now, they’re taking their largest competitors to court over this patent.

This is the kind of frivolous shit that can kill a community (or an industry for that matter). Once you’re running under the threat of potential lawsuits, you start to wonder why you should continue? Imagine if Ultra Products gets somewhere with this suit, what happens next? Perhaps they’ll start going after tech sites who’ve published a modular power supply HOWTO. After all, this is apparently THEIR intellectual property now.

What a great way to destroy innovation, eh?

Take Cliff’s Fanbus for example. He was arguably the first person to popularize this simple (yet ubiquitous) case mod. It’s a staple in the modding world. There wasn’t a single case modder in the early days who didn’t build a similar circuit for their case fans (let’s not leave the out the baybus, of course). What would happen if some merry band of greedy asswipes tried to secure a patent for this design, then start suing people left and right into licensing and royalty agreements.

You know, this concept sounds eerily like another lawsuit where a company tried to hold patents for an operating system then sue it’s users into licensing compliance. I wonder how well that worked out for them.

When you’re a manufacturer, there IS such thing as bad press. It’s the kind of press that alienates you from your own customers. The kind that happens when you steal an innovation from the very group you’re trying to hawk your goods to, then raking them over the coals with it.

Computer enthusiasts have a very hard time forgetting these kind of things.