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Dolby Buys MIT's DTV Vote for $30 Million
An anonymous reader writes "MIT's campus newspaper, The Tech is reporting that the university will be receiving $30 million from Dolby Laboratories. This payment is in return for MIT's vote on the "Grand Alliance" committee responsible for choosing the audio standard for digital television (DTV). Dolby also appears to have paid off Zenith, another committee member. The professor representing MIT on the committee stands to receive $8 million personally.
But here's where it gets truly odd. After dutifully voting for the Dolby standard, MIT attempted to collect on the bribe, but Dolby refused to pay. So, MIT sued to collect. In the end, MIT and Dolby settled out of court.
Says The Tech, "There's clearly a conflict of interest," [MIT's Jack] Turner, [associate director of the Technology Licensing Office] says, but, "it can't be avoided. MIT's reputation as being pure... in its academic evaluation of things is very important." Yeah sure."
8 million dollars!?
We are blind to the Worlds within us
waiting to be born...
I wouldn't have paid that much!
cx
"MIT's reputation as being pure... in its academic evaluation of things is very important."
Apparently not.
Want to Know How to Cheat the GPL? Read On!
...how much money the MPAA has earmarked for bribes to get the signal encrypted.
0 1 - just my two bits
"It's lucky 3G spectrum wasn't available earlier in the United States or cell carriers would be dropping like flies. The bungled DTV system saved their ass.
The FCC assigned a royalty sharing organization, ATSC, to deliver a "unified" Digital Television system. But ATSC had no motivation to use the improved European-developed COFDM DTV system now the world-wide DTV standard. Unlike ATSC, it works. You can get it free over the air or in a bus. I believe former FCC director William Kennard is to blame. He didn't want to slow down the "lucrative" 3G auctions. Now we're stuck with a broken DTV system, the VHF auctions are delayed (again), and everyone lost...except the cellular carriers.
In the UK, all you need is a $99 box with rabbit ears. US broadcasters are stuck. They may eventually be forced into PPV and soft porn since only rooftop antennas can pick up ATSC. The FCC let this happen. It's criminal negligence."
Is everyone corrupt anymore?
How do I sign up to be a comittee member so I can get bought with absolutely no reprecussions?
You think that I'm crazy, you should see this guy!
And Court sanctioned too. I'm somewhat speechless. You americans are a bunch of tough cookies.
The only skin on a computer should be porn.
he who sleeps with big corperate monies is sure to get a STD.
I live in a giant bucket.
This is outrageous! They gave them that much money because they voted for thier product? Is Dolby Labrotories that concerned about competition? Last time I checked they pretty much had market cornered with thier audio playback standards, why wouldn'e anybody vote for them?
[n8.r0n] http://petesweb.spymac.net/
Only if you're not the victim.
Speech: Free
Beer: $699.00
Does it?
"The lesson to be learned is not to take the comments on slashdot too literally." --Vinnie Falco, BearShare
Whats the point of having a committee where members openly bribe eachother?
I was under the impression that MIT was there to represent the people.
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
In Japan they chose to use ACC or mpeg4. And as for the rest of Asia, Europe etc etc it will all be different. Digital TV was the big chance the world had of unifying on a couple of standards. As usual though, such an idea is but a dream...ho hum...
Meat is murder, I eat chicken.
Does anyone even consider Digital TV relevant anymore? In this Internet-backed digital age, TV piracy runs rampant. Personally, as long as MIT keeps serving in #tv-rips and #anime-domain I'm not going to DDoS any Dolby servers.
"The lesson to be learned is not to take the comments on slashdot too literally." --Vinnie Falco, BearShare
The MIT people choose the format they did because they would have made $8 million in royalties and the like. (This was 1993)
Then, in 1997, they had a royalty dispute with Dolby over the royalties. The settlement out of court is the $30 million mentioned.
The interesting part is that that 1993 decision helped make US digital tv use dolby instead of mpeg, like they apparently use in Europe
Cogito ergo sum in Slashdot.
AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) not ACC
Meat is murder, I eat chicken.
Yes it does!
If this was a government and not a University wouldn't we call this kind of thing bribery and corruption? Still guess we can't grumble as university students of today are tomorrow's politicians.
Soldier on over to the AVS forum and observe that lots of folks (myself included) receive ATSC DTV just fine with a simple indoor antenna.
...from what I read in the article, it seems that philips paid this guy because both of their standards were about the same, and performed the same, and they all agreed, so he accepted the payment so that MIT's work wasn't all for naught.
Which sounds like a pretty good idea to me. I mean, why have competing standards and go through all the expense of that when they're nearly the same, and one side is willing to be bought out and move on?
vk.
MIT's The Tech is actually located at http://www-tech.mit.edu/... way to check those links.
If you blog it...
Lets just stop calling this "voting" and start calling it scoring - "MIT gets paid to score for Dolby!".
Whats even worst is that they took them to _court_ over it - am i the only one that things this is disgusting? what the fuck is the point? where are we headed if we can clearly, publicly buy off votes and even bring people to court when the bribe isint paid?
After reading the article, i'm a bit less outraged. The 30M$ is royalty payments, apparently on technology developed at MIT. The professor in question is the sole inventor, which is why they're giving hime 8M$ of it.
Please read the article, it's actually a bit more of "Dolby tried to screw MIT out of royalties" instead of "MIT accepts bribe to vouch for Dolby standard."
You have to start questioning the point of having this commitee. Furthermore,you have to doubt it's validity outright. I think that there is much to learn from this though. This gives us an insight into what is happening in those exchanges between politician and MPAA/RIAA lawyers/spokes people. They will win legistlation with money, we must win it back in the hearts of the people (and it will take a lot of people).
"My Lord, is that....legal?
ATH0 Bitcoin: 1DnwFLXczVZV8kLJbMYoheUrpqHesjxrSi
Why did they need to take Dolby's bribe? Couldn't they get their students to help?
These kind of secret backdoor deals taint the supposedly open review process. How secure can we feel with the standard of DTV given this kind of collusion between MIT and Dolby?
From the Tech article:
"It was very closely held information that there was an agreement between MIT and Dolby," Rast said. "It wasn't something that everybody knew about at the time," he added. "It wasn't common knowledge."
"I think the other members [of the Alliance] would have been quite upset" if they had known about such an agreement, said Joel Brinkley, the author of Defining Vision, a comprehensive account of the HDTV standardization process, and a reporter for The New York Times.
"I was not aware of it, and I was speaking to all of them," he said. "Many millions of dollars were at stake. The contract for Dolby was one of the best things ever to happen to that company. They are now the audio system for every television that will ever be sold," he said.
ancarett, historian and zombie gamer
Except when the bribee is in a foreign country. Then it's a felony. So we're fucked at home and fucked on the international market where everyone else is allowed to bribe.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
This is a clear example of the bastardization of higher learning because of the influence of money. 2+2=4 even if the boys at Pfizer want it to be 5... It may be tempting sometimes to come up with the answer of 5, when somebody is paying you multi millions to do so.
Perhaps it is a good opportunity/time to re-evaluate the funding of research and development at universities. A proposal I would like to see is that government heavily subsidizes the research, but all the profits from products that come from the research are plowed right back into universities general funds, paying for more research as well as lower tuitions, and more outright scholarships.
---
When you come to a fork in the road, take it! --Yogi Berra--
The whole point of granting some esteemed organization a vote and membership on a committee is that they use their judgement and weigh greater interests in the ballance, not whore themselves to the highest bidder.
There is absolutely no point in giving MIT another vote on any panel. They'll just use it like a cash windfall which it's NOT supposed to be. We could actually sell standards control to the highest bidder and put the cash to some use, we don't because it's obviously a bad thing. MIT doing this by proxy is no better, in fact it's worse because they betray a trust.
As I read the article, it sounds like the whole point of the Grand Alliance was to get the various parties to agree on a standard. Whicj is exactly what they did. MIT and Dolby had competing approaches and MIT made a deal with Dolby to drop their's in favor of Dolby's for a Financial return. Zenith did the same thing. The MIT rep profitted, but he would have profitted if the MIT approach was selected. This would be a big deal if the group was supposed to be a bunch of unbiased technical wizzes choosing the best product, but it wasn't. This is like MS and IBM agreeing on a .NET approach.
I've seen people in the theatrical sound industry rakishly refer to Dolby as the "Microsoft of film audio".
* As is generally the case, my opinions do not reflect those of my employer.
I had faith in educational institutions up until now (and MIT of all places I'd have never believed anyhtign like this could happen), but I guess MIT is nothing more than a RIAA in another context. Dolby and MIT: the next Microsoft and ANSI.
Like punching someone in the dark.
I write in my journal
I'd really have to agree. What a stupid, stupid site.
1. First you get the money offerred.
2. THEN you vote as asked (if you want future bribes).
I mean if someone offers you a bribe, are you expecting them to keep their word later as well???
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Since the founder of bose works for MIT.
...A camel is a horse designed by committee.
That's bullshit and you know it,
you are only allowed to bribe goverenments in the third world to secure a monopol on the market and get your hand on their natural resources.
If that's the way it works, then everyone should be allowed to do it.
Let me tell you a story... I live in Brazil. Brazil sheduled for the middle of 2002 the date to choose wich HDTV standard it will adopt (the american, european or japanese). The big TV stations from Brazil tested all tree against every possible thing: cable transmition, air transmition, ghosts from reflection, moving targets (inside a bus, a train, etc...). NO OTHER COUNTRY DID THIS. The conclusion? The american system sucked, because it only worked OK with cable distribution (90% of brasillians don't have cabe TV). The european was so-so and the japanese was damn fucking good, becase it was difficult to find a place were it didn't worked. So what system was chosen?
None. The date of the decision was cancelled, and a full boeing of americans went to Brasilia (the Capital) to bribe people. Now you see the potiticians saying that "oh,wehave to choose this based in the economy, not tecnical meriths... The americas will let us export TVs for the USA!" Ok. Let's see:
1>Brazil makes 2 TVs and sells one to USA and other to some brazilian, gets money of 1 from the USA and other is paid with brazillian cash.
2>Brazil sends 70% of boths TVs price to USA for "royalties".
Veeeery smart.
Camel is a horse designed by a committee payed off to give a cigarette company free advertising.
Several years ago, 8-VSB and COFDM were both being demonstrated over the air at the NAB convention in Las Vegas. For 8-VSB to work in the convention hall, they had to use a rooftop antenna, a preamp and a bunch of double shielded 1/2 inch cable. The receiving antenna for the COFDM demonstration was a Radio Shack set top dual bow tie antenna. The antenna was IN THE BOOTH and you could move it around to see the affect on the picture. I was able to move it almost 90 degrees before the the picture was affected. Remember, this was INSIDE the Vegas Convention Center where there were literally THOUSANDS of other TV's, Radios, computers, transmitters and god knows what else (remember, this was the National Association of Broadcasters convention). What this demonstration tells me is that 8-VSB can't work in a moving vehicle but COFDM will. Once again the United States becomes the only one in the world whose pants are on correctly (look dad, Johnny's the only boy in the parade who has his uniform on properly!). By the way, two weeks ago the FCC approved digital radio broadcasting for FM using a system that uses the adjacent channel sidebands. Though it works fine where stations are fully spaced, on the east coast (where many FM stations are grandfathered short spaced) it's likely to not work at all. Even worse, it's likely to cause interference to the analog broadcasts of these short spaced stations. The rest of the world rejected this approach for DAB and instead put it on it's own band. It seems that we never learn from our mistakes in this country, so we repeat them over and over and over!
Money == Speech.
So, all Dolby did (according to our, um, illuminated judiciary) was have a nice "discussion" with MIT.
Isn't that the very point of a committee? To come together, talk, and convince everyone to vote for of your POV?
Apparently, MIT was convinced. Eh?
Would someone out there, please, please, take Bush's lead and bomb the be-jesus out of Washington DC and come save us?
Being from MIT myself, I have actually read the article that is being referred to here and although I agree it was a pretty poor thing to do, it's not as bad as it sounds. The truth of the matter is not that Dolby bought MIT's vote for $30 million, but that if the standard was chosen MIT would be in line for $30 million in royalties. In the end it's more halfway between bribery and voting for oneself than strict bribery.
Is it just me or does the "Grand Alliance" sound like a bunch of guys sitting around wearing blue water-buffalo hats? (apologies to the Flintstones).
Seriously though, that is one arrogant name.
way to go USA, disregard the quality and go for the buck. now im stuck with 2 phase power, Dolby digital DVDs, and DTV with crap as Dolby sound.
why cant the people at DTS bribe the hell out of people so i can live in an aurally perfect world!
First, do you honestly thing MIT is along in this? If so, you are totally crazy. Graft and corruption is absolutely rampant throughout the entire university system.
Federal (aka. taken from people at gunpoint) funds being stolen and converted into patents is SOP.
Converting Federal grants directly into corporate assets is SOP ("Trusted Computing anyone?)
Burning grant money on utterly useless, and known to be fruitless, endevors is SOP (I call it stealing).
Taking corporate bibes to "influence" learning is also SOP (from Microsoft, Capital One, right down into the Coke/Pepsi nonsense).
All in all, the University system swims in the exact same cesspool of corruption as C-level Corporate and Governmental America.
Yet, as a potential hiring manager, I'd bet a dollar to a doughnut your open job descriptions will still state "BS/BA required, advanced degree prefered".
Until this sort of gratuitous self-reinforcing monopoly is broken, and both individuals and Universities have to complete on matters of factual value add -- don't expect anything different.
And the transmitters were the same power and the same distance away?
After Enron, WorldCom, the MS judgement, just to name a few, it is really suprising that ppl do unethical things for the all mighty $$?
DTS was not beat out for any reason other than they were not ready when DVD was ready to ship.
Note that the standard audio for region 2 is ostensibly MPEG audio, although it gets little use.
DTS is not a better codec than DD. The claims that DTS are better revolve around DTS allocating much more bandwidth to the sound and compressing as little as 3:1. DD compresses 12:1. I would argue that a codec that compresses 12:1 and still sounds good is by definition a better codec than one that compresses 3:1 and sounds good.
I am specifically not addressing relative quality of the resulting sound, merely how advanced/good the codec is.
That demonstration was funded by Sinclair corp. (who owns a large number of broadcast stations in urban markets), and it was, as you said, several years ago. Since then, new generations of ATSC decoding chips have arrived (one was demonstrated at that same show) that significantly reduce the amount of multi-path interference.
In addition, 8VSB transmits up to 50% further at the same power levels, which benefits sub-urban and rural viewers.
This was a dead issue within two months after that NAB demonstration. The ATSC standard exists, and is quite workable.
...
3. Profit!
Go on, mod me down, my karma is Godlike and I get 5 mod points a day...
--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.
works much the same, but I'd like to see Dolby or any other big company pull a $40 million dollar check out of, say, Fritz Hollings slobbering mouth.
I'd rather wrestle a pit bull for a pork chop.
(btw, to confirm the "S" in Hollings' name I looked him up on google with:
riaa representative "back pocket" congress)
-dameron
"Yeah, I know .
Everyone's sleasy .
Now you're sleazy too."
business is sleazy.
it's what happens when you want to win too much.
Politicians suspected of recieving "gifts" in return for favorable legislation.
thanks
When I was at Michigan State University a UNIX system admin was making alot of personal trips out to Sun Microsystems which caused some University personnel to question a possible conflict of interest in that Sun products were all of a sudden being "hyped". This would have been in the early 1990's. But now the University environment must be so corrupted that MIT sees nothing wrong? Fire the mother fucker you assholes! Oh I get it now, a "bribe" from a communist organization to change the official school emblem to a hammer and sickle. A "payoff" from Hustler magazine to get all those coeds' names and phone-numbers. Twenty dollars for a blow job from the President's secretary? Go for it you MIT fucks!
A congressional demonstration compared ATSC with COFDM.
Sinclair also had an indoor DTV reception demonstration. However, instead of comparing the COFDM signal's superiority over analog TV, it demonstrated COFDM's superiority over the 8-VSB signals used by Zenith and NxtWave. A Sinclair Press Release titled Sinclair Demonstration Proves Superiority of COFDM-Based DVB-T Digital Television Standard, available at http://www.sbgi.net/press_releases.html, noted the indoor antenna used for the COFDM demonstration was placed on the witness table, while the antennas used for the 8-VSB demonstration were hidden. The Sinclair release said, "The two ATSC demonstrations relied on a pair of carefully aimed, directional antennas hidden from view behind large curtains on two separate windowsills. After repeated questioning from Chairman Tauzin on why the antennas were placed in the windows and not on the witness table, as the DVB-T demonstration had done, Nxtwave CEO Matt Miller admitted that if the directional antennas were removed from the windowsills the ATSC reception 'potentially' might fail."
Nat Ostroff, Sinclair's VP of New Technology, commented, "The hearing demonstrated how robust and consumer friendly the DVB-T COFDM standard is regardless of antenna type inside a building. We received higher data rate transmissions in arbitrary locations in the room using a simple five dollar antenna. The ATSC demonstration required the use of a carefully positioned, directional antenna that was hidden behind a curtain and taped to a windowsill. It was as close to being placed outside of the building as possible."
Sinclair noted that two of the five countries that had previously adopted the ATSC 8-VSB standard have announced their intentions to formally rescind adoption of 8-VSB, citing poor indoor reception performance.
You just cost me 6000 dollars! 6000 dollars!
Slashdotted Terminal Downtime?
You can have it fast, accurate, or pretty. Pick any 2.
MIT is a big place, with over ten thousand students, administrators and faculty. To maintain an open environment of acadmic freedom, people are given free reign to do what they want. When you see an article like this, where "MIT has a seat on some committe," that's not MIT acting as a whole; that's probably just some professor in the relevant field, and maybe coworking with one or two administrators.
When you give that many people free reign, you'll find a few bad apples. You can do one of two things. You can either police the students and faculty, and ruin what makes MIT great, or you can accept the fact that a few people will abuse it, and deal with those abuses as they come. MIT has chosen to do the latter. This means it gets PR scandals like this every couple of years, but overall, it's better for the progress of science, and so for goal of the school.
This isn't the first time people at MIT have acted inappropriately in the public eye. They've gotten pirates, malicious crackers, cheaters, etc. In almost all cases, when the school as a whole found out about it, they did their best to do the right thing. Before we pass judgement, let's first see if this was actually a case of corruption, and if it is, how the school deals with it.
Does anyone know if this was actually corruption? The idea of many of these committees is to just to come to an industry concensus, which often involves some sort of profit sharing. Say you've got three parties, with three different proprietary schemes. The party whose scheme is chosen gets $100mil in royalties. Very often you'll see something where the three parties pick one at (semi)random, and agree to split the royalties evenly three ways. It's very possible this happened here. The Tech reporter doesn't appear to have checked up on it.
Yes. Both transmitters were in the mpuntaintop antenna farm used by all the Las Vegas TV stations. Similar powers were used.
DTV signals go too far already! DTV stations go MUCH further then predicted. They interfere with each other much more then predicted too. They also interfere much more with analog TV then predicted and they interfere with Land Mobile (police, fire etc.) much more too (see last weeks stiry about WCVB-DT here)! Why? because they're AM! Obviously you're a broadcast engineer and understand about the 'capture effect' of FM transmission. For the uninitiated, with FM modulation (The F in COFDM) a signal that's 20 db stronger then another one completely overrides the weaker signal. It's called 'capturing' the receiver and it works quite well in the suppression of interference. It's also why aircraft radios are all AM (we want the weaker distress calls to be heard). ATSC is AM modulation just like that on your AM radio. It's affected by static, lightning, car ignitions, vacuum cleaners with bad brushes and (yes) clocks in computers just like AM radio is. Maybe you don't directly hear it, but it does degrade the data transmission. And, just like AM, the transmissions go further, a bad thing. Why? because TV stations are grouped by market areas. Each area is clearly defined by county. So when a DTV station in Manchester, NH can be clearly received in Albany, NY over 120 miles away (and completely out of its market area) that's a disadvantage, not an advantage.
I completely agree that many CEO's are appointing themselves outrageously high salaries - and there's often a huge problem with that.
On the other hand, at least those are private businesses, and theoretically, the stockholders could vote to oust the CEO if he/she was ruining the company.
Public education is considerably different. All of us are paying in to it, yet we have almost no say-so in who runs the schools. Unlike shareholders, we don't get to vote on changes to their policies.
I'm not even saying I really have a problem with a dean of a large school making $100K per year. What I *am* saying is that with that salary, he/she should easily be able to pay for his/her own transportation and house. Furthermore, those positions tend to have strong political tie-ins. They often get much more than their actual salary in "under the table" perks and benefits.
As just one example, there's a state college where I live where I know for a fact the dean has appointed a number of his own relatives and friends to various positions of authority. You can't tell me he did it just to be a "nice guy" to the people he knew. I'm sure it was very much a "I scratch your back, so you scratch mine." situation for him. It's pretty questionable if some of his appointees are even remotely qualified to do the jobs they're doing.