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Just when you think they couldn't sink any deeper they prove you wrong. This time it is Mr. Phil O'Shaughnessy, the vice president of Corporate Communications who has just sent Cease & Desist letter to daniel_k via this forum post.

daniel_k has been providing owners of Creative audio cards with the functionality Creative Labs wasn't capable of providing them with, namely Windows Vista drivers with the same level of functionality as their Windows XP drivers.

Unfortunately he has gone one step further than that and enabled some features reserved for high-end cards to work on low-end and EOL products and he also asked for donations to be able to continue his efforts.

Mr. Phil called that stealing from Creative Labs and if the company he works for didn't have a track record of intentionally disabling features instead of adding new ones through driver updates, he would have every right to ask daniel_k to stop.

This corporate PR suicide has already made quite a splash around the Interweb. Apart from Creative Labs' forum many others have picked up the story — Slashdot, reddit, digg, The Inquirer, etc and everyone is voicing their discontent with Creative Labs' attitude towards their loyal customers.

As I have already said in their forum, now is the time for their workers — developers, engineers, support people, etc to go on strike and demand from the suicidal leadership to step down before their personal reputation goes down the toilet with the company they work for. If they have any dignity left after working this long for Creative Labs they will do so. If not, they deserve everything that follows.

Of course, in case you are crazy enough to use Microsoft Windows Vista and Creative Labs' products, you can already find daniel_k's drivers on most torrent trackers even though he wasn't the one to upload them. I can hardly wait to read Anakata's or Tiamo's response to Creative Labs' legal threats regarding those torrents. That will be worth a day of laughing for sure.