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."

Comments

Well good for them

[Jucius Maximus]

When a group of people decide they don't like the legal state of things and decides to come up with their own standard, they are rising above petty legal fights and truly addressing the issues faced by individuals and businessed whose interests are firmly in the hands of patent owners that only care about themselves.

Way to go! - This belongs in the same ranks at the (Ogg) Vorbis Project.

Re:Well good for them

[stienman]

I bet you only say this when it appears to be in your favor. Try this similar sentence on for size:

When Microsoft decided they didn't like the legal state of things and decided to come up with their own standards, they were rising above petty legal fights and truly addressing the issues faced by individuals and businessed whose interests are firmly in the hands of patent owners that only care about themselves.

You are purporting to believe in a value, yet I doubt you believe in the value, just this particular case.

BTW, since these video disc players are not DVD licensed, do they have the right to use DVD keys to decrypt existing DVDs? These keys, I imagine, are licensed along with the patent and royalty agreements. This will work great in non-DMCA countries, the USA, however, will likely stop them at customs after some mild lobbying from various patent owners and trade groups. It's very likely that these are destined for the huge chinese market, but they are probably hoping to skirt around the law and get these into the US as well.

-Adam

Re:Well good for them

[Paul Komarek]

How do you license a key? I don't think one can patent the key itself. You could claim copyright or trademark over it, I suppose, but I doubt that would have much real effect anyway -- how would you tell the difference between a copy of a key and a reverse-engineered key?

-Paul Komarek

Region free?

[Triskaidekaphobia]

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?

This sounds bad

[forgoil]

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.

not replacement

[wmacgyver]

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

Even so...

[foo fighter]

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.

Re:What a difference geography makes

[sporty]

19 companies combined can afford many lawyers. A teenager prolly can't. Doesn't excuse any actions, but that is the case.

What about CSS?

[sterno]

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.

Maybe not.

[bstadil]

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.

It's Distraction by Bruce Sterling

[LazyGun]

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

Re:It's about time.

[Erasmus Darwin]

"this is a really good thing we need to support these open standards to avoid the Information Nazi's."

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.