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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)
Will decide to find some arguement that they've licenced the GUI (yes I mean GUI) and get customs to confiscate all other OSes that have any form of GUI..
But seriously yet again the consumer is going lose.
'branded players' -- more expensive but sometimes better quality...
'unbranded' -- cheaper and sometime shoddy.
Let the consumer decide - over time the shoddy players will become history, the cheap but good players will become brand names etc...
Score: Big Corp's 1; public 0; little corps -1
--- Users are like bacteria -> Each one causing a thousand tiny crises until the host finally gives up and dies.
This infuriates me. I'm an anime fan and was intending to get my hands on a regionless player eventually so I'd not be stuck with only US dubbed and subbed releases. I'm currently struggling financially and I can't afford luxury items like DVD's and players, though. So it looks like by the time I do get around to affording them, regionless players will be a thing of the past (I can imagine a conversation with a future child: "Daddy, what was 'Fair Use'?"). None of my friends or family have been able to find regionless players either - one of them got one that was advertised as regionless and it was in fact region 1. Where the hell do you find them??
-Kasreyn
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
You say steal but you seem to mean reuse.
Look at the GNU project, the Apache project(s), the Linux kernel, the *BSDs, count the number of Debian packages, all the applications on Savannah, Sourceforce and Freshmeat. Look at all the great technologies created at Universities (which are often the basis of those "great" technologies, or cheap ripoffs if you like, that are sold in the industry).
There are a lot of more incentives to create great technology then making lots of money of it. Focussing on how to make money on something often
You might want to read Anarchism Triumphant by Eben Moglen who explains this a lot better then I can.