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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)
"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.
I'd prefer not to waste my time buying new equipment to save cost. Not to mention downtime, etc. because you are waiting for your next player to be shipped.
I'm not afraid of falling, it's the sudden stop at the end that frightens me.
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.
It's just you, but you probably didn't read the article anyway.
Are you familiar with the Regulation? Did you bother to look it up?
Here it is: Bulletin EU 1/2-1999
No, it's not blatantly illegal. In fact, they're required to do it.
For example, at a company I worked for, we held a patent on a particular kind of machine. This patent meant that no one could bring a similar kind of machine in to North America. We had a fellow that would "watch" orders to and from one of our overseas competitors. He would then notify the port authorities and when the device arrived, it would be impounded.
The company held the patent and you cannot do an end-run around it by importing a device from a country where the patent is not held.
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
What I actually meant was "blatantly illegal to buy." I agree that Philips is doing what is legal.
My real wonder is about when I buy it on eBay. What could be done to me when I try and import it from cousin Miroslav in Eastern Europe? I suppose Customs could seize it, etc., but are there any "real" penalties for the consumer?
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
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.
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
I think you have to accept the only reason we have DVD players at all is because these patents exist and are enforceable. Why would any company spend the money to develop product if they couldn't exploit it? This is what patents are for.
Reliable, Great Value Hosting: $7.95/mo 2.4G/120G
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.
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
Today's typical mass produced consumer electronic device is manufactured just as shoddily. Unless you get into the real high end, the quality of the average product, esp. when compared with earlier times is catastrophic. My father's 30 year old record player still works like a charm, only few of today's DVD players will work in 30 years. Why? Because today cheapness always wins over quality and because with digital devices, shoddy manufacturing doesn't imply bad function.
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)
It's not just because of the parts.
In a record player, typically there aren't as many parts that are static, humidity and voltage sensative.
Nor are there delicate bits of optical equipment with lenses and lasers and other solid state gear.
It's like comparing the amount of maintance an F-105 needed compared to an F-15. Or the Folk-Wulf crews that bitched about the work it took to keep a Me-262 flying.
My mom's Sony record player works like a charm, but it has about 1/8th the number of electrical systems a CD player has.
It's apples and oranges to compare a record player with a CD/DVD player. A better comparision would be a 1st Gen LaserDisk or one of those magneto-optical disk drives from the early 80s and a DVD player from today.
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.
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?
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.
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.)
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
No, please don't stop this.
At my work we can only see "authorised" websites, and Slashdot (oddly enough) is one of them. Pretty much all of the external links on Slashdot are inacessible to me, so I appreciate people posting the article, even if it is often just karma whoring.
Get a better job at a place without police-state filtering.
Why should the rest us us suffer with extended page-load times caused by morons who post what's already available because YOU have braindead filters in place?
It's also a copyright infringment and could get slashdot SUED, and SHUTDOWN. Is that what you want?
THINK PEOPLE!
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
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?"
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.
Why don't you just say they're made by prison labor, while you're at it?
That would complete the standard unknowing anti-China diatribe.
Jeez.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
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.
We had a fellow that would "watch" orders to and from one of our overseas competitors.
Interesting, So you worked with Echelon in order to do your work? Fascinating, please tell us more.
When you sign up, can you get a webaccess interface or do you get a daily tape with information? I'd really like to know because we have been talking about it here at work to sign up for it also.
I wonder how much dfeldman got paid by the MPAA to make THAT comment? ;)
I expect that if patent enforcement is really heavily dependent on this process, there is some legal channel for order monitoring set up.
No, it doesn't make sense. It's probably Divx.
It's just a scam.
There is NO WAY IN HELL that SOFTWARE can turn a cdrecorder which does 650 - 700M into a 5G DVD recorder.
If you want to do divx, software is free anyway
(at least on Linux, I don't use Windows..)
If they don't have a DVD emblem on the front they don't have to be 100% complient with Philips.
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...
Yes, you get reliability, but with licensed players you also get intentional incompatibility with most DVDs on the face of the planet, and copy protection that keeps you from doing anything that they don't want you to do with the small percentage of discs that are available to you.
;)
Buyer beware!
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.
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
region encoding is built into the hardware these days, so it doesn't matter what OS your using.
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.
Doh! If there's multiple companies, it's not a monopoly. Look it up in a dictionary.
You're contradicting yourself. Either it's good for one company (or a group of companies) to come up with a standard, or it's good for everyone to have competing formats and wait for consumers to decide on one. After VHS/Betamax, customers simply will _not_ buy anything where the industry's relying on the second option; think of all the next-gen floppy disks which came and went before the CD-ROM (with a fixed standard) became the norm.
If one company/group does it, they'll be putting in significant amounts of money and time for research, so other companies save themselves an R&D budget by licensing that research.
As far as getting fees back goes, work it out. Philips and co spend years working on the successor to CDs, investing millions in R&D. If they can't get a return on that investment, that money is just gone, man. And if they can't get a return on investing in new products, they won't - they'll just steal off someone else who's come up with a new idea. Eventually no-one produces anything new, bcos it's not in anyone's interest to do so. Great idea, dude.
Grab.
My father's 30 year old record player still works like a charm, only few of today's DVD players will work in 30 years. Why? Because today cheapness always wins over quality and because with digital devices, shoddy manufacturing doesn't imply bad function.
Also the device is expected to be obsolete in a few years (or a few months in the case of Japan), so what's the point of building it to last.
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, it's not.
it's hardcoded in the units FIRMWARE wich is SOFTWARE. it can be changed by either reflashing the firmware or replacing a chip. mostly the same thing ppl do with DVD players that needs an "internal surgery" with a soldering iron to become region free.
What ? Me, worry ?