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?

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.

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.