Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
Sadly, most people don't want to be educated about complex issues. The reason rights erode is because the average sheeple doesn't care and doesn't want to care.
Cynical? Not really; I'm being realistic based on years of experience in activism. People only care about issues that directly affect them; it is very difficult to get people interested in anything that might inconvenience them. People watch DvDs, but don't exercise their rights to free speech -- so guess which one they care about more?
All about me
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.