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Taiwan Joining Chinese Royalty-free Video Disk Effort
BeardStreet writes "In an attempt to stop the flow of royalties to the various DVD licensing bodies (e.g. DVD6C, MPEG-LA, etc.), 19 Taiwanese companies have come up with a royalty-free DVD format called EVD which is compatible with a similar effort going on in China, called AVD. Capacity is about 1 GB higher. Their goal is to avoid having to shell out US $15 to $20 per-player royalties. EVD/AVD players will still be able to play traditional DVD disks but will not have the official DVD logo on them, thus avoiding the licensing fees. It's a political issue as well, in that China needs to balance the flow of royalty money going out of their country, especially with DVD players falling rapidly in price."
Despite what the article says, these players will either owe royalties, or they won't be able to play the standard DVD media.
The royalties aren't for the use of the DVD trademark (well, the bulk of them, anyway). They're for the use of patents.
Now if they're really clever, they might be able to implement alternative techniques that, while producing the same results, don't use the means that the patents cover. Considering the number of DVD patents involved, this seems unlikely. (Sure, you could avoid the Macrovision and region-coding patents easily enough--don't include those "features.")
However, just as many fuel saving engines may have been quietly put away in dusty little closets in the back of some big-manufacturer's back room,
Ooh! Ooh! Urban Legend! Urban Legend!
CSS might not be patented (security through obscurity), but there's other patents on the DVD spec. see here
DVD has always been light on capacity (and certain features could have been implemented better). In particular, one of the big advantages to DVD over VHS is being able to use multiple scriptable audio and text tracks, thus allowing you to subtitle and/or overdub for multiple languages. Not something we think of much here in the US, but in China/Taiwan, pretty much every release should have Mandarin, Cantonese, English, and if necessary whatever language it was originally recorded in. At least. The problem is even worse in Europe because with so many languages to cover, they're forced to skimp on audio and video quality, to say nothing of the bells and whistles we're accustomed to here. The "subtitle" tracks are not text but actually pictures of text to accomodate any font, but are limited to only four colors (two of which are are black and clear) and only to a certain sector of the screen. And there's no way to use post-press modifications(such as fan translations not available on the original).
Beyond that, DVD quality is way below that of HDTV (not that there's much of that yet). So, we really could use more space - a LOT more (FMDs and FMCs sounded promising). And a much more flexible format (allowing simple outside scripting and track replacement/overlays as well as modern compression algorithms and file formats like MPEG-4) with smarter options (like a real UTF-8 text track coupled to an on-disk vector-type font library, and full-color compressed RGB-alpha sprite/video overlay tracks). But even a 10% or so increase in capacity could make a big difference in much of the world.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
CSS used to be a trade secret. It is not and never was patented, and if they try to get a patent on it now there is plenty of "prior art," include deCSS itself. :-)
Then some rather intelligent youths in Europe figured out how to break the profoundly weak algorithm used to encrypt DVDs and restrict their playback (but not bit-for-bit copies, as most DVD-Rs were capable of doing back then, before the deCSS case and their wholesale redesign).
CSS isn't a secret anymore, indeed there are T-Shirts, songs, and 7 line perl scripts that can algorithmicly crack the code without any keys whatsoever.
The Taiwainese or Chinese can use any of this widely and publicly available information to make DVD playback devices capable of decrypting and playing DVDs and, I suspect, under the rules of the WTO, there is absolutely nothing the Copyright and Media Cartels can do about it.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
As a person of Chinese descent, I observe that many Chinese, if not other Asians living in Asia, will only pay what is neccesary to obtain the material object. Reason why is because they simply don't have enough cash to pay for royalties that entertainment and technology companies want them to pay. The a lawyer in China only makes about $141. The GDP per capita in China is about $3,600. Ever since the Communist takeover in the 20th century, many Chinese have become thirfty, budget-minded consumers.
Believe me, many Chinese are hardcore bargain-hunters (Ive observed this in Hong Kong) and usually do not purchase something without getting the lowest possible price.
As a result, Chinese usually spend their money on neccessities such as food, health care products, etc...they also would like other commodities sold in the Western world, but cannot afford them. One of these much-wanted commodities is entertainment such as DVDs, software etc...Anyway, they usually buy pirated products because the legal ones typically cost 5 times more.
The Chinese and Taiwanese governments really don't care about royalty payments demanded from companies in foreign countries...simply because they want to save money. As a result, Taiwan and China rank among the largest pirated software and home video markets in the world, just below Brazil.
Software and entertainment companies should really take a look at how much the average person makes in the country they release theire products in...