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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."
Way to go! - This belongs in the same ranks at the (Ogg) Vorbis Project.
If the Chinese and Taiwanese want to bypass the DVD tax then lets hope they don't mind annoying the studios as well and make their players region-free.
Can the studios detect these players and make sure their disks won't play on them? They did that super-new region coding thing a while back didn't they?
Pirated cheaper EVD/AVDs being sold around the world, making the movie industry see even more red than before.
If I were the guys who own DVD (Phillips and friends), I would demand that the fee is paid in the store, when someone buys the player.
This doesn't sound like a step towards a better movie format for everyone, this sounds like VHS/Betamax all over again.
I could be wrong though;) We'll just have to see what happens.
I don't see any mention in the article of this being an open standard. It's likely that this player will go the way of the Apex player here in the US. The article makes reference to their "AVD" player not sporting the DVD logo, and not being a DVD player in a 'technical' sense. . .well, both of these things are true for DeCSS and look what happened.
I don't think this will replace DVD format, however I hope this become the replacement for VCD format. VCD has always been nice in that, a lot of DVD players support it, plus you can make VCD yourself. No region lock out. If in the future, most DVD players also support this much like they support VCD playback, this will allow consumers to be able to make their own media that plays back in standard DVD players
Okay, now I am as much a supporter of "free as in freedom" as any other good slashbot. But while reading this story more carefully, and discussing it with some of the "regulars", I believe I have reconsidered.
All of the innovation that we have seen, from the triumph of the Wright brothers, to the soaring skyscrapers that make this country beautiful, has been due to the drive of a few precious individuals. Their motivation? Money.
Take away the royalties that protect them and urge them to develop new things, and we're back in the Dark Ages. Like it or not, intellectual property rights is the hot-button issue that sculpts the political landscape.
Where would we be without it?
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
We'll never see these players in the US.
The MPAA will see to it that customs holds these at the border, and the parties hoping to receive the shipment will be tossed in the slammer.
Basically, these will be considered controlled substances like drugs and whoever's trying to get ahold of one will be treated as a narcotics dealer/user.
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
"Both of those groups are prepared to stop imports of unlicensed DVD players and to bring lawsuits against companies that ship them."
Anything that plays the DVD format will still be considered as infringing on the DVD patents.
Once again, we here in the freedom loving west will be protected from having to decide if we want cheaper and better technology. After all it is much better when a group of companies work together and decide to impose a standard on the world and then charge us extra for the privilege.
Why don't people go after these companies for Anti-trust violations? When standards are used by an exclusive group of companies to impose market control at the expense of consumers, it is illegal under US law. Companies are supposed to compete with eachother, otherwise it isn't a free market.
19 companies combined can afford many lawyers. A teenager prolly can't. Doesn't excuse any actions, but that is the case.
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ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
Okay well that's all well and good, but are they going to be able to support CSS decryption? Seems to me that their ability to play DVD's is almost useless if they can't decrypt CSS, seeing as most discs require it. So they still end up having to pay royalties and having to enforce region encoding.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
i'm against intelectuall property, but legally can they do this? if it plays dvd's, it supports the format, how can they get around not paying the royalties? sounds like the communist state is just flexing their muscles, not that there's anything wrong with communism, just the leaders!
--fetch daddy's blue fright wig, i must be handsome when i release my rage
The MPAA will see to it that customs holds these at the border
If they try to do this the logical counter move is to file a complaint with the World Trade Organization stating the case that the Regional Settings is a deliberate and unlawful inpediment to free trade. The risk of this being declared illegal combined with suits for Punitive damages subsequently filed in the US courts is high.
MPAA will give in long before that as the down side grossly outweighs the alternative.
NB: Write your representative in the country you are in and complain about Regional Settings. Its amazing it has survived so long.
Help fight continental drift.
Well, not so much in those words, but I do like the principle of the thing. Chinese, particularly rural don't have a lot of cash to swing and eliminating Itellectual Property tax is the next logical step, as pretty much everything else has been shaved to mass produce electronics. (It's still a big deal to the PRC to keep up/improve the standard of living for their base of support (i.e. the majority of chinese who don't wear western suits and talk on cell phones). I was pretty stunned to see 5" B/W TV sets in the grocery store for $12.99 (yeah, that cheap!)
I imagine the powers that be (Hollywood lobbyists, lawyers, etc.) will push something forbidding any of these open technologies from reaching US shores (because it doesn't kowtow to their wishes, of course.)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
It's Distraction by Bruce Sterling:
It's the year 2044, and America has gone to hell. A disenfranchised U.S. Air Force base has turned to highway robbery in order to pay the bills. Vast chunks of the population live nomadic lives fueled by cheap transportation and even cheaper computer power. Warfare has shifted from the battlefield to the global networks, and China holds the information edge over all comers. Global warming is raising sea level, which in turn is drowning coastal cities. And the U.S. government has become nearly meaningless. This is the world that Oscar Valparaiso would have been born into, if he'd actually been born instead of being grown in vitro by black market baby dealers. Oscar's bizarre genetic history (even he's not sure how much of him is actually human) hasn't prevented him from running one of the most successful senatorial races in history, getting his man elected by a whopping majority. But Oscar has put himself out of a job, since he'd only be a liability to his boss in Washington due to his problematic background. Instead, Oscar finds himself shuffled off to the Collaboratory, a Big Science pork barrel project that's run half by corruption and half by scientific breakthroughs. At first it seems to be a lose-lose proposition for Oscar, but soon he has his "krewe" whipped into shape and ready to take control of events. Now if only he can straighten out his love life and solve a worldwide crisis that no one else knows exists
This is the question! If China and others decide that they want to do this, they may not be able to import these units into the US because of the CSS. If they have CSS installed, than they must pay roylty fees since this is part of the legitimate standard. So.....The question still stands - can they import them legally into the US? If the DCMA stands, the US gov't may consider this an infringement of "reverse engineering" since they aren't paying any licensing fees!
Quite possibly they are trying to create a seperate standard for Europe or just the far east?
Open standard? Who said anything about an open standard? The article mentions that the companies involved are trying to secure patents for things related to their new standard. I suspect the "royalty-free" phrase that's being thrown about applies only to the 19 companies that're working on producing the standard. To draw a computer analogy, this isn't like the BSD software developers vs. Microsoft or the GPL software developers vs. Microsoft, but more like Oracle vs. Microsoft.
Though of course it all depends on how the Chinese government would view it. However I suspect that if a company has the right Communist party connections, it can manufacture for export whatever the hell it likes, especially as the current piracy situation there suggests the Chinese government coulndn't give a flying f*** about the RIAA or MPAA. They're more interested in stamping on political dissent and Falung Gung.
At the very least, the situation might resemble the current one with DVD player region coding. The makers would pay lip service to hardware copyright enforcement, but quietly make it known that it can be disabled with a jumper in order to boost sales of their hard drives which would otherwise have little to recommend them over ones made by the big, mainstream manufactures.