Philips vs Unlicensed DVD Players

Kallahar writes "NewScientist is running an article about how Phillips, Sony, and Pioneer have "asked customs officials throughout Europe to seize players made by unlicensed factories." Philips, Sony and Pioneer have pooled many hundreds of patents covering all aspects of the DVD system. Philips administers the pool, grants licences and collects royalties, which are then shared three ways." This comes on the heals of philips going after copy protected CDs. The draw for these DVD players for consumers is probably both price, and the fact that they are often free of those pesky region encodings (especially nice for anime junkies)

Comments

Re:Apex 600a

[puck01]

From what I've read over at the Apex Forums Phillips is stopping the sale of Apex600a players on Ebay. Here is a link to that thread.

Here is a copy of the letter sent to people trying to sell the Apex600a on Ebay:

Dear Sir:

Sorry for your frustration. As our previous message states, as the patent holder, we have a right to stop ANY sale of an unlicensed product, and at this writing, the manufacturer of Oritron and Apex DVD players is chosing to be unlicensed. It is the Manufacturer of the player who is unlicensed, and therefore ANY sale of the product infringes our patents (NOT trademarks). The patents are on the DVD technology.

We are sorry for this inconvenience to you, but at this time you cannot sell this DVD player on eBay. Please be assured that we are working on this at many levels and we hope the manufacturer becomes licensed soon.

Thank you for your understanding and cooperation.

Regards,
Ginger Affolter
IP Assistant

Philips Intellectual Property & Standards
PHILIPS ELECTRONICS NORTH AMERICA CORP.
1000 W. Maude Avenue, Sunnyvale, CA 94085-2810

E-mail: ginger.affolter@philips.com
Web-site: www.licensing.philips.com


I just did a couple quick seaches for 'apex600a' and 'apex 600'. I got no results. So, you can legally buy an Apex600a in the US, like I did from Best Buy, but it is now not allowed to resell it on Ebay. That makes sense.

puck

R2 Anime DVDs & English Options

[Robotech_Master]

Actually, all the Region 2 native Japanese discs that have been released so far of Hayao Miyazaki's anime also include the English dub and English subtitles (though they're actually "dubtitles," i.e. captions for the English dub--and, in the case of Kiki's Delivery Service, they're dubtitles for the Streamline dub, which isn't even on the disc!).

A lot of anime which have English dubs, such as Giant Robo, include them on the DVD sets as a matter of course, just because, hey, they have the room, and the Japanese seem to think English is "kewl". (Which would also explain why they commissioned Macek to dub and then Japanese subtitle Macross: Love Do You Remember and Megazone 23 Part II--you can still find copies of those subtitled dubs floating around fansub trading circles to this day--and why the Armitage: Polymatrix movie was done only in English, with Japanese subtitles for the folks at home.) Some companies have even started including genuine English subtitles on their discs, though the names of the series escape me (I want to say Gunbuster, though I can't remember specifically).

That being said, gaijin fans have been importing anime from Japan ever since the days of the laserdisc, which didn't even have a capacity for subtitles. After all, if you're going to do a fansub, you want crystal-clear originals--and hey, DVD is even better than laserdisc. There's even a program out there for Windows that lets people view their unsubtitled DVDs in conjunction with downloaded fansub scripts (though it didn't work very well for me when I tried it). And when it comes right down to it, people watched anime in straight Japanese with synopses, scripts, or best guesses for years before fansubbing was even possible.

So claiming that all-region DVD players are not a boon to anime fans because Japanese discs don't have English is a bit misinformed or downright disingenuous. Better do some more research next time.