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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)
But with the unlicensed players you also get shoddy manufacturing quality, especially with the rise of counterfeit electronic components from the Shenzhen region of China.
Buyer beware!
I'm not afraid of falling, it's the sudden stop at the end that frightens me.
"asked customs officials throughout Europe to seize players made by unlicensed factories."
When reached for comment, spokesmen for Sony said that Phillips and Pioneer were considered unlicensed machines, Phillips spokespeople said Sony and Pioneer were unlicensed, and Pioneer said that Phillips and Sony were unlicensed.
Is it me, or does this seem blatantly illegal?
It also seems like the big guys (Philips, etc.) could hit these things with all sorts of potential incompatibilities.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
Supply of low-cost DVDs in Europe set to dry up
14:45 12 February 02
Barry Fox
European supermarkets and high street electrical stores could soon see their supply of low-cost DVD players and discs dry up. Philips controls key patents on DVD technology and has grown tired of asking the manufacturers to pay royalties. The Dutch company has now 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.
Most of the low-cost players come from factories in China. International trade newsletter TV Digest estimates China produces around 10 million DVD decks a year, mainly for export. European and North American importers then slap on Western brand name labels and sell them for under $100.
Legal warning
The DVD Forum, which sets the technical standards for DVD, lists several dozen factories in China. But only four of the factories have so far taken licences.
As a first step towards policing the patent pool worldwide, Philips has asked European Union Customs Authorities to impound unlicensed DVD-Video/ROM players and DVD-Video/ROM discs under the EU Council Regulation that covers goods that infringe patents.
Although there has been no formal announcement, Philips's legal website warns European importers that if they do not want their stocks stuck in Customs they should ask the factory to show them proof of a licence.
Philips says that even if goods get through customs, the company will act against wholesale and retail traders.
"The trade in unlicensed products may expose your company to liability for patent infringement" warn Philips' lawyers.
I suppose they're doing what (they suppose) is best for them, without caring about others. They're trying to push other manufacturers out of business, or they want them to pay ...
...
It's tough but that's the way how it goes, it's the same in every branch of today's business! *sigh*
- Reality bites, but that's what life is
Life sucks.
To: All E.U. Customs Officers
Subject: New directive
Effective immediately,
All efforts to halt drug contraband, illegal alien smuggling and terrorist infiltration is to be suspended. The biggest threat to EU today are unlicensed DVD players. Me must put a stop to this terrible instrument, and protect the children from the ravages of illegal region code hacking.
That's why you go to ebay and find an Apex 600a while you still can. Very excellent machine, will play any region disk you throw at it, dolby digital out, and you can disable macrovision. The newer unlicensed dvd players are of pretty shoddy quality.
Is this going to be the top priority for European enforcement? I really doubt it.
I think that from the perspective of deciding how to use their resources, European nations have have bigger concerns than where the DVD players are coming from... and any associated patent issues.
A few might be taken off the streets, but I doubt they are going to expend great resources to rid Europe of "unauthorized" or "unlicensed" machines...
Sam Nitzberg
sam@iamsam.com
http://www.iamsam.com
Obviously Philips is going after anything which hurts their hardware sales. This is both good for consumers (no cd copy protection) and bad for consumers (going after other hardware companies)
//m
Where's the incentive to create if it's legal to just steal the invention and pay nothing?
Saying this is contradictory to Phillips's position on copy protected CD's is not correct. Phillips going after illegal DVD manufacturers is very similar to them chafing against copy protected CD's.
Someone is using a format that they invented, have the patent on, and should for a reasonable time, have the ability to apportion the use of that patent(s) out as they will. The difference here is that the folks they are going after are making money "stealing" Phillips's technology, unlike a certain sixteen year old kid from Norway.
While I don't agree with everything they do with their patents (region encoding is complete bullshit theivery....glad I don't live in the UK and have to pay $30 per DVD), this is a relatively new technology and they do hold the patent...this is what patents are for, to keep lazy assholes from making money off you your invention for a certain period of time.
Other than that I think what's going on is perfectly fair, just that it's a little odd to be going after this at the customs level.
Look, I know these electronics compaines fronted the money to research DVD technology and they were it's main pioneers.. However as a consumer, I just don't give a damn, to put it bluntly. It's my dollar, I'll spend it how I choose. If I purchase a machine I'll perform whatever hacks or workarounds necessary to make it function the way I would like it to. That's just how it goes. If we just stop buying products from companies we don't care for, they'll get the message or they'll go away..
I just saw an article on Yahoo that stated that the patent royalties amount to $28 per player. That's over a third of the price for some units, and that's the retail price, not the wholesale price. It's no wonder that companies aren't paying up.
It's just like with other intellectual property--when you price it too high, people will avoid paying.
This is a civil dispute between the manufacturers and those who claim patent rights. Surely it should not be the business of customs to close down manufacturers of DVDs without some kind of civil decision in a court.
Note that the customs officials have not only been asked to impound players thay are also impounding disks. The disks are not being impounded because the content is copyright, they are being impounded because the media is owned by these corporations.
This is an outrage. It's like impounding books because someone claims they own the patent on the printing press. We need some protection against companies claiming to own and control the information medium in common use today.
Sorry. Not that I'm for region encoding or anything... But the "especially nice for anime junkies" parenthetical just doesn't ring true. Any anime DVDs released in the states will play on a Region 1 (?) DVD player. Any DVDs released in Japan... are going to only be in Japanese. So unless you went from just-discovering-anime-isn't-all-porn to fluent-in-Japanese in one year, the "anime junkie" you speak of sure as hell ain't you.
On the other hand, I -do- know people who speak Japanese and appreciate imports. These are the same ones who modded their SNES to play imported Super Famicon games.
The enemies of Democracy are
Does anyone know if it would be possible to produce and sell a regionless dvd player while still licensing the necessary technologies, or do the require you to agree to implement region checking in order to give you the licenses?
"If English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for everyone else."
Okay, I admit it, you got me in the beginning. But when you said "Macrovision is an unbreakable encryption system that keeps pirates from copying DVDs" you made me laugh, but I figured you just were a bit uninformed. But when you said "Most bootleg players run an embedded unix operating system" you gave it away entirely. It don't know if you were trolling, or just going for satirical, but damn, that was pretty funny.
In order of number of patents held:
Matsushita (Panasonic)
Sony
Pioneer
Toshiba
Philips
Hitachi
Thompson
Others (Mitsubishi, JVC, TW/AOL)
(From "DVD Demystified" by Jim Taylor)
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
If we don't enforce patent rights, then we'll lose. Patents are a monopoly, for a limited period of time. This encourages R&D, because investors know they'll have some time to recover their investment & profit from their R&D. It also exposes the new technology created, so that others can learn from it even though they can't use it for free.
There's always the right of others to do the same thing in a different way. If the original patent isn't the best solution for a problem then somebody will come up with a new, better, cheaper alternative (an patent that, if they wish).
So the question is: "If there weren't a patent system in place, would anybody have invested time, effort & money into developing DVDs? Would the consumer even have them as a choice?"
The the other question: "Where do I get one of these cheap DVD players before they're all pulled from the shelf?"
"Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever." --Napoleon Bonaparte
As a home theater enthousiast this means losing the ability to buy a nice player such as the Skyworth 1050p with Faroudja deinterlacer which outputs progressive scan on both PAL and NTSC, something the DVD forum forbids.
Projector and HDTV owners love this feature to get rid of the nasty scan lines on their CRT equipment, without the need for buying an expensive external scaler.
The problem with progressive scan is that they cannot easily apply macrovision to it, so you get a very clean signal without copy protection. As a result they have banned it for PAL.
To my knowledge, there are no VCR's which accept a progressive RGB signal, so I cannot grasp why they are so paranoid when we can make perfect DVD copies on our PC's much more easily ?
So far, from the three companies mentioned in the post we've only seen official progressive scan support on region 1 NTSC through component outputs.
For the videophile, this is really BAD.
Now that Enron is gone, does Microsoft's ownership share of President Bush increase?
I've found it interesting how patents and other `intellectual property' tend to get pooled by a handful of major companies. This, my friends, is how standards really get made these days. Heck, similar practices date back a hundred years or more.
This is really annoying to me, as these companies kind of turn the idea of a patent on it's back. Sure, they defend them from the man on the street til the cows come home, but then they collude with other big companies. Am I the only one that thinks this is backward?
I agree with you that Philips and the bunch have the patents, and that the manufacturers of cheap crappy dvd players should pay licenses. I disagree with some of the problems you've listed though as apparent reasons they should go after the manufacterers. The only real reason for it is because these groups do owe them money. for the rest: if they don't run native code and cause problems, thats something the customer should have to deal with for not paying money for a nicer player. macrovision prevents legal uses of dvd players and i would want it disabled on mine. i don't have a dvd player for all my entertainment equipment. say i want to watch the movie in my room, without moving to vhs, i can't. layer compatablity, the user has to deal with it, again, if they want it, they can pay the extra for it hackability is a good thing, it lets you watch the movie you want to even though it wasn't poorly enough done to have been made in here america.(or if your from another country maybe you just want to watch a garbage movie in order to laugh at us)
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
One sentence: YOU HAVE NO IDEA OF WHAT YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT.
where do you get your facts? since when is Macrovision "unbrekable"? do a search for cracks to Macrovision protection in DVD in google and you will be surprised...
hacking is bad? And it is earsier to hack becuase it uses some form of *nix? so using, let's say some form of other OS will make it "harder" to hack? how many things how you hacked lately? (BTW, some of the hacks for removing the Macrovision protection are implemented in OSes other than *nix).
Try first THINKING before you post....
"I can't see a f#@!! thing" - photon a to crossing photon b
Chuckle, cough, roll eyes.
Every day on the streets of NYC, you see cops bust street vendors with fake Gucci and DK bags. The pirated video tapes, CDs. The've cracked down on people selling unauthorized FDNY hats. On a larger scale, they break up sweatshops that are pumping out fake Tommy jeans or Nautica jackets.
So why's this news? Countefeiters exist in every market segment, and while they're small, they get away with it. Once they grow to a size where it begins to cut into the profits of the company, the company cracks down.
European Customs officials are already hard at work keeping those fake Nike shoes and cheap Anne Klein knockoffs. It's just another thing they'll watch out for.
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
Macrovision is an unbreakable encryption system that keeps pirates from copying DVDs onto VHS tapes or video CDs.
you either work for macrovision or are horribly mis-informed.
macrovision is super easy to defeat. Little video stabilizer boxes have been available for over 15 years now that easily defeat it, remove it, and actually make the resulting video look better because the macrovision mess is removed.
Macrovision is a joke, only macrovision is stupid enough to think that it works, and nobody takes it serious anymore. It's there to only annoy the guy wanting to make a VHS dub and doesnt have the noggin power to get around it.
Remember Macrovision != copy protection and it is the easiest to break and remove.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Funny. Very funny.
I suppose that good things like APEX players couldn't last forever. APEX claims to be the second largest DVD player distributor in the U.S., next to Sony. The APEX product line, of course, is made by companies like Shinco of China. Shinco makes some great products, which include the DVD players that play Megadrive (Genesis) ROMs.
I have an APEX player (ad 660)... Do you?
Its not 'heals' its 'heels'. You know the saying 'on the heels of ...'. We're talking about the body part not something a doctor does.
BlkPanther
I find that most often I end up learning from necessity, rather than for enjoyment.
No one understands the truth behind DVDs outside slashdot and a few other groups. As far as the general public is concerned, DVDs are god, and the best thing since sliced bread. If you try to explain to them that DVD is just a method for large corporations to control you, what you own, and what you have the right to do then they give you a dirty look.
The people need to be educated about region encoding, macrovision and the fact that the producer can even control your fast-forward button. I object to any system that implements an artificial limitation on hardware that you own. If its in my house, then i have access to the circuitry, thus i can make it do what i like - ok so its very hard to mod a player, but its technically possible, therefore the manufacturer shouldn't bother putting in the restrictions in the first place.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
I better remeber to run my IPCHAINS, or my DVD player might get hax0r3d.
It is my impression that the demand for region free DVD players is relatively limited in the states, certainly compared to Europe. Region 1 (North America) has the largest DVD selection, and thus the need (for the general public) to import DVDs is limited. Furthermore, most American TV sets would have difficulties showing PAL (the European TV standard).
Europe is region 1 (together with Japan, and as others have noted, an increasing number of Japanese DVD releases feature English subtitles), and while the DVD market is rapidly growing, we have still a long way to go, before matching the selection found in region 1, especially wrt. special genres, such as anime.
Luckily, region free DVD players are readily available in stores. These are however usually not Apex etc. players, but modified brand players. I personally own a region free Pioneer DVD player, which handles all regions beautifully. A further advantage is that most European TV sets are able to handle NTSC. There is nothing shady about these modifications - most stores will perform them, and many places do not even sell non modified players (in Denmark, that is).
From my perspective, the only attractive feature of the Apex etc. players is that they often handles (XS)VCDs better than ordinary DVD players. As (XS)VCDs never were an item here in Europe, this is not really much of a problem, unless you burn your own.
--- In omnibus requiem quaesivi, et nusquam inveni nisi in angulo cum libro
Yes, I find it amusing that courts are willing to gloss over the technical details and stretch common-sense "real world analogy" reasoning to some aspects of copyright law (eg, linking and framing a copyrighted image that resides on somebody else's public web server constitutes a violation, because it looks like you've displayed the image yourself) while at the same time resorting to the gritty technical details for other aspects (temporary RAM copies, etc.)
Macrovision isn't encryption, it's a simple analog circuit.
Oh, and yet another thing...
My APEX player plays any disk just fine, without a hitch. The first generation of 600a models had some problems, but were fixed with a firmware revisions. For the record, almost all licensed manufacturers had the same problems at one time, especially with multi-layer disks.
Get a fskin' clue.
This is a Troll, not links, no real info, just a buch of words all joined that looks like a good post.
Anyway, you can always buy a good video capture card for your PC and save a DVD video directly to DivX on your PC, so no real protection at all.
Sigs are for morons... Wait a minute...
It does for people who live in Region 2 countries.
I understand that. Obviously I wasn't clear in my post that the US-centricism of the post came solely from the fact that I was responding to a comment made by the Taco-meister. But I was. Even just in the US I was admitting that my statement wasn't universally valid. It only applies to Taco. Of course I appreciate imports, and thus loathe region restrictions! If it wasn't for the imported laserdisc, I never would have gotten my fansubbed Nausicaa!
CmdrTaco lives in Michigan. I myself hail from the same place, so I can be pretty sure that it's not Region 2. And I can be reasonably sure he doesn't speak Japanese. I doubt he's using any dubbing programs to add subtitles to laserdiscs. In fact, I'm going to go out on a limb and say he doesn't even get the imports of those titles that -do- have English subtitles. I was mocking Taco's self-appointed title of "anime junkie", and implication that he, too, suffers from region restrictions and their affect on his "addiction". That's all. Lighten up.
The enemies of Democracy are
I worked at a video store briefly and we had people come in all time saying "This DVD is broke. It won't play in my dvd player." I always would ask what kind of player they had, and it was APEX or ORITRON. Sure enough the DVD was fine but it was dual-layer. It seems like many of the major studio new releases are. The store was in a lower-middle class part of town where the Wal-Mart was very popular so it was no surprise. I kind of felt sorry for those people who spent their hard earned $88 on those things. The most ironic thing is that the district manager had a raffle for a free DVD player, and guess what ... it was a piece of crap, ORITRON. The winners came back a week later and said that many discs didn't work and yep, they were dual-layer. When I finally decided to get one, I got a moderately expensive JVC.
Read the rest of the message... *sigh* It was humor!!!!
III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIII
I'm sorry... I must have missed the portion of Taco's blurb where it says "I AM AN ANIME JUNKIE!" Oh wait, that's right, it doesn't. All it says is that it's nice for anime junkies, wherever they might live.
Jeez, hate the guy if you must, but at least be rational about it.
"Prejudice is wrong; you should hate everyone the same."
Making a system proprietary does not make it more secure (i.e. free from hacking). You do not need tons of people to hack a system. In fact you need just one person: later he distributes his hack and the ball starts rolling.
No "embedded OS" is safe when confronted with the rigth tools, and someone with MOTIVATION...
"I can't see a f#@!! thing" - photon a to crossing photon b
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.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
No, but you obviously missed all the previous Taco blurbs where he did say that. When exactly did it become irrational to use someone's past when interpreting their present? Oh right, it didn't.
:)
And I don't hate him, I'm just mocking him.
The enemies of Democracy are
My current understanding of the 'hackable' DVD market indicates that the Daewoo 5700 is the current holy grail model.
http://www.dvd-wizards.com/darrenk/Daewoo_DVD5700
Disable region encoding; diable macrovision; NTSC/PAL/RSC format supported; mp3 supported; component out. Only thing this is missing is progressive scan.
There is a good reason for these players, however. They are clearly easier to manufacture, resulting in a cost savings for the consumer. Instead of maintaining 5 separate product lines with different hardware configurations, there is a single line with a flashable BIOS at the end for each region. So Daewoo isn't courting the after-market hackers, but rather just being a good manufacteurer.
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
Will you still defend patents when the WTO makes governments extend patents to 100 years? Patents make sense as long as the duration is short, say five years. In other words, you have five years from the time your product hits the market to make a monopoly profit. The only qualm is that they create a "standard" and then patent it. Standards are meant for interoperability. Who cares about interoperability if you are the sole controller of said technology.
To answer your question, yes. Someone would have developed some kind of DVD like video system. Why? Quality in movies. The studios love DVDs and would have at some point created this technology.
Most of the low-cost players come from factories in China. International trade newsletter TV Digest estimates China produces around 10 million DVD decks a year, mainly for export. European and North American importers then slap on Western brand name labels and sell them for under $100. Sounds like counterfeiting to me.
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
But the two go hand-in-hand. New York City saw a remarkable drop in violent crime because of increased enforcement of "quality of life" crimes.
It may seem trivial to bust kids jumping subway turnstiles, but low-grade collars allow the police to hold someone and run checks for outstanding warrants and desk appearance tickets. Often this leads to an arrest for a more serious charge.
Now, this same technique can be abused, but used correctly it gives the cops an opportunity to get "up close and personal" with people who might otherwise be at liberty to commit more crimes.
Java is the blue pill
Choose the red pill
The real reason it seesm Phillips is going after them is that they are making region-independent DVD players which doesn't hurt Phillips patents but the Motion Picture Industry cartel's efforts to shackle users fari use. Yet another use of the IP infrastructure to squeeze money from consuemr--not by adding value but by limiting choice. Greedy drones.
Please knock it off. I work in the electronics parts industry (Controller of Corp.) and know what I'm talking about. This has been a major problem for years now.
EBN Online has many, many articles on this subject.
Here is a sample. Use their search engine, and you'll find others.
Try The ERAI website for checking the effects this problem has on our industry. It's costing us millions, if not billions.
Before you open up your mouth and spew your "humanitarian" garbage, check facts first.
I'm not afraid of falling, it's the sudden stop at the end that frightens me.
I think in 20 or so years school children will be reciting this:
I pledge allegiance to flag of the Incorporated States America, and to the Profit for which it stands, one Corporation under God, indivisible, with avarice and AOL for all.
It's not so much a change in attitude favoring "cheapness over quality".
Instead, it's more of a societal interest in having whatever is the latest and greatest. High-tech electronics go from "cutting edge" to "old tech" in just a few years. Why bother engineering a DVD player to last 30 years when 99.9% of the customers will be using something completely different in half that time?
By contrast, the phonograph record was in use for over 70 years before anything really began to render it obsolete. (Sure, you had "open reel" tape, 8-track tape, and then cassette tape - but people were still buying and using records throughout all of these technologies.)
IF it is possible to get a patent license from Phillips with reasonable terms (e.g. a license that does not include DVDCCA terms, such as the player must not have firewire out, must have additional circuitry to support Macrovision, etc) then there's no problem with this.
But IF Phillips is only licensing their stuff to people who get a DVDCCA license, then that's product tying, corrupt, etc. and I don't want my tax money being used to have customs enforce an illegal policy.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
well considering Taco was constantly promoting animefu for a while, i'd say its pretty safe to say he is an anime junkie.
that and the fact he is usually the one who posts the anime stories to the mainpage
Bring back the old version of slashdot.
Perhaps one should be more concerned with protecting the trademark of the DVD logo than the manufacturing of the hardware.
Assuming the trademark is protected, then a consumer can be certain a logo'ed machine is manufactured to compatible specifications.
Back in the old IBM XT/AT days, many different computer vendors built machines compatible with the IBM spec but without IBM parts. It should be no different for a vendor to manufacture a DVD player using generic parts that don't conform to the original design specifications, if that vendor can successfully sell a machine that does the job.
I wonder how much dfeldman got paid by the MPAA to make THAT comment? ;)
I just found this advertisement for software that, they claim, can turn any CD burner into a DVD burner. If true, it would make copying DVDs a lot easier and cheaper.
Does this make sense? And does anyone know anything about the product?
If this is true, then Houston, we have a problem.
I disagree that Philips loses money to infringing companies. It would be more correct to say that they do not /get money/ from these companies. If it's not money already in your pocket, you can't really lose it, can you? You simply aren't collecting money you are due. Same argument as to why copying isn't stealing, really.
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
In the US, the large electronics chain, "best buy" had a special in which they were selling players by mintek for 60 bucks back around thanksgiving/christmas. i'm not sure if they were eating part of the cost or not, but if best buy wasn't that 28 dollar licensing fee is half the retail cost of the player!
Bring back the old version of slashdot.
Bear in mind this is not some kind of movie industry policing operation but merely an attempt by an inventor of a piece of technology to get paid by other manufacturers of that hardware.
This is the most blatent kind of infringement you could think of - on a par with trying to pass off your copied CD's as originals in a store.
when you pry from my cold, dead, hands!
If they don't have a DVD emblem on the front they don't have to be 100% complient with Philips.
In reading through the comets it appears many are of the belif that the actions philips are taking is a restriction on multi-region and non-region players.
From my experence in replacing a stolen DVD player, The liscenced manufacturers are producing players that don't follow the region restrictions. This might be the market that I am buying in - New Zealand, But I doubt that special versions would be produced for such a small market.
So what it leaves is companys that are producing products without liscencing the techonology they use from the patent owners. This is entirely consistant with philips' position on Non Red-Book CDDA disks - Unliscenced use of their IP and patents.
Then again, this is only my opinion.
Kal
If a company uses an propietry custom built in house developed embedded OS that the 'hacker community' has had fuckall experiance with, while no tools or compilers are publically avaliable for it, I'd say odds on, with everything else being equall, it would be more secure than otherwise.
The Z-80 bit was what broke my suspension of disbelief. Then it got funny real quick.
Don Negro
Perl 6 will give you the big knob. -- Larry Wall
I guess the money from Phillips's patent and royalties paid to the DVD-CCA would be separate (though Phillips is prolly part of the DVD-CCA and would see some of that too).
Interesting though how the DVD-CCA is not going after these folks, too, as it's obviously a violation of the DMCA(as they would have you read it...)...or are the rip-off player manufacturers paying the DVD-CCA and not Phillips? That doesn't sound right to me...
Actually, that's a very loose analogy... Copying a DVD/CD/CD-ROM/tape/etc... for the sake of making yourself a copy that you normally wouldn't buy is quite a bit different than making copies to sell. Sure, if you wouldn't buy it because it's too expensive, or very hard to get, or you just don't like the manufacturer then they aren't, technically, "losing" money on your copy. But, if you turn around and sell 100 copies on the street then they are losing money. Since these $100 players are being sold consumers are spending money to buy DVD players. That money is going to China, or wherever, and not to the holders of the patents. If, for example, APEX sold 1000 DVD players at $100 and Philips sold 100 DVD players at $120 how much money did Phillips make (12,000 Gross)? If APEX actually paid a license for DVD for say $20 per player now how much money does Philips make (12,000 + 20,000 = 32,000)? APEX is, in effect, stealing $20,000 from Philips. And Philips has lost $20,000...
What's more, these players often have serious compatibility problems which cause headaches for users and content providers alike
"Compatibility problems"? The bootleg DVDs aren't the ones with the compatibility problems. They play 90% of the DVDs on the planet, instead of just DVDs that are marked for the same region as the player, which limits most DVD players to one sixth, if not less, of all of the DVDs on Earth. THAT'S a compatibility problem.
So, if a computer DVD drive might be used to play DVDs with an unlicensed program, can they stop it at the border?
Are we only shipping pre-installed windows boxes again?
This just gives me one more reason to set up a Linux DVD player; then again, I don't have any DVDs because of all this nonsense.
Hey, maybe everyone in the world should ONLY buy region 1 dvd player.
sure, there owuld be a period where some things would be hard to get, but a very short period.
consider:
1)Region 1 gets most titles all ready.
2)The movie industry would drop a brick when they could sell the non region one movies.
3)pretty soon region one would be just as good as regionless, since all titles would be released that way.
Off the top of my head, I figure it would take a year befor everyone was producing only region 1 dvd's
Its hard, but it would work.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
You basically have 3 points.
1) Philips loses $ on lost licensing fees.
Yes prolly true
2) Unlicensed players are likely not to handle instructions/layered disks etc properly.
Well, NO. They can produce a player but they forget to implement the instruction set? Unlikely.
They can't play layered disks? Maybe. But same with some licensed ones.
Plus, they can play from any region, a plus to users' experiences. (esp frequent travellers)
3) Content protection.
Really, should players be implementing protection?
I mean, should I have a text file with all my passwords and insist people only read it with my super secure program instead of notepad?
All that aside, how would piracy skyrocket? People pirate DVDs. When did you last see a pirate copying DVDs onto VHS and selling them?
Pirate DVDs are PRESSED in factories in China or wherever, and are unrelated to players being licensed.
This is hilarious, because I've had a Philips DVD711 for about the past year and a half. For about the past year and four months, it's been region/code free, done completely without ever even opening up the dang thing.
Check out this site to see how you can make your Philips DVD player region free.
Real anime junkies don't need RC free players in Europe, because Japan and Europe are both RC2 afaik.
By contrast, the phonograph record was in use for over 70 years before anything really began to render it obsolete.
It wasn't so much "rendered obsolete" as killed off by the manufactures. At least they tried, but club DJ's wouldn't accept the "subsitute" as an alternative.
No -- I won't. But I also won't throw out the entire patent system because of this one issue! Have these companies benefitted greatly from these particular patents? Yes. Have they benefitted from all of their patents? No. Overall, have their benefits exceeded their expense? I presume so since they are still in business -- it's called capitalism. Overall is the patent system's cost-benefit ratio to the public at large optimal -- I doubt it, so let's work on making it better.
There's a trade-off between benefits to general-public and benefits to the patent-holder. Patents should, like all of our laws, maximize benefit to the general-public. The general-public, more so its technically capable members such as those on these fora, must be aware of what's happenning & assure that the process remains beneficial to all.
"Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever." --Napoleon Bonaparte
You say that DVD is inferior -- then why are you using it? To be inferior requires that there be something better, that fact that you still use it means that it is not inferior, at least not in the aggregate benefits to you.
Many people on flashdot owe their livlihood to the intellectual property they produce. I presume that most, like me, work for companies that use legal protections for their IP -- patents, copyrights, trade secrets. Even if you GPL your code, you're taking advantage of this legal system albeit in a scheme that is more informal & somewhat like barter.
At least the sales of real DVD players would fund & encourage Phillips' development of other technologies. So your scheme does what? How does it help anybody except yourself?
"Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever." --Napoleon Bonaparte
there's always people unable to see things without examining it thorough applicable laws and regulations. so then there will always be persons or entities using holes that conservative forces don't dare to patch up.
it tells something about complexity of nation's laws when ordinary citizens give up on thinking what's right and what's wrong and resort to law-jargon and prior cases instead.
Preserve old classics: copy your collection onto all hard drives.
If they really want to target only makers of DVD players, they should get their own act together and level the prices of DVDs in different regions or stop this stupid region coding BS altogether.
When somebody drives their own interests on the back of a legitimate (or good) cause, that somebody ought to get punished big time for using people's good will to wrong causes! (hint.hint.gwb, don't let us down)
Preserve old classics: copy your collection onto all hard drives.
Well, NO. They can produce a player but they forget to implement the instruction set? Unlikely.
Actually, this is true. A number of players just don't impliment all of the instruction set or do it incorrectly. The famous Apex 600A for example, has quite a few problems with this sortof thing (like on the Abyss DVD..)