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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."
"MIT's reputation as being pure... in its academic evaluation of things is very important."
Apparently not.
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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
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.
...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.
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?
Face it, there are no more bastions of ethics left. Gentlemen, leave your convictions at the door. They'll only get in the way as you try to grab all of those dollar bills.
MIT has shown us the true 3 step business model:
1) Build a seemingly immaculate and incorruptable reputation.
2) Prostitute everything you worked so hard at.
3) Profit!!!
You think that I'm crazy, you should see this guy!
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."
Please read the article more carefully. Dolby is paying MIT $30M in royalties FOR A USELESS TECHNOLOGY! If MIT's own DTV standard had been chosen, they would have earned substantial royalties, but since they sold out to Dolby, they missed the boat. But, Dolby paid them anyway! That's why it's vote-buying.
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
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.
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When you come to a fork in the road, take it! --Yogi Berra--
Pot, kettle, black. Which parts of these paragraphs did you not understand?
The article clearly makes the point that the MIT system (the one that Jin invented, I assume) was technically superior, but Jin and Dolby carved out a deal between themselves that gave both Jin, Dolby and MIT a cut of the winnings, regardless of who won.
Once the financial issues were stitched up, Jin was free to cast his vote with Dolby, despite independent tests showing that the MIT system was superior -- and his allies appear to be arguing that his motivation was patriotic rather than financial.
Now in future, would you please not lecture other people unless you've read and understood the article yourself?
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.
You know, there are something like 220 million televisions in the United States, owned by about 300 million people. It'd be fair to assume that all but a very few-- maybe two or three hundred thousand-- of those people are ignorant of the difference between NTSC, PAL, and SECAM. Some 299,800,000 people in the US alone don't even know that NTSC, PAL, and SECAM exist, or what they mean. For fifty years, we've lived in a world where Asia, Europe, and the US have all had different and incompatible television standards... and yet, somehow, the sun continues to rise each morning.
The vast-- and I truly mean vast-- majority of people will never know that the United States, Europe, Asia, France, and wherever-the-heck-else have incompatible television signal formats. For obvious reasons you can't receive Asian terrestrial broadcasts in Europe anyway, so for most people the issue simply never comes up. It's just not that big a deal.
I write in my journal
You sound like one of the rubes that believed all of the Sinclair propaganda.
COFDM has it's advantages, but 8VSB was chosen for good reason - stronger signals over longer distances at the same power levels. This is a valid decision given the sub-urban nature of US viewers. CODFM is a convenient solution for multi-path issues in urban areas, but those advantages were rendered moot last year with the introduction of 3rd generation chipsets that reduce multi-path interference.
Also, the European system ISN'T HIGH DEF. It's 16x9 standard def. It's comparable to our satellite and digital cable receivers.
ATSC receivers will be the same price ($99) by next Christmas thanks to the FCC requirement for ATSC tuners to be included in sets larger than 34 inches. The cost of the chip sets are about $100 now. They should drop dramatically (to about $35) now that volumes will be increasing.
The COFDM vs. 8VSB debate was ended 18 months ago among the DTV adopters. Put it to rest.
Parents who love their children don't teach them to obey the law, they teach them not to get caught.
How is that a net influx of dollars? You need to check the math again.
If Brazil makes 2 TVs and sells 1 domestically and exports the other, then it gains export revenue equal to the price of one TV.
However, if it has to pay 70% royalties on both TVs to U.S. , then its nett exports is actually -0.4 of the price of a TV.
Also, exports and diversification of exports are not ends in themselves. They're means to and end, namely economic progress. It is generally a good idea for a country to increase exports and to increase diversification of its exports, but it is not always a good thing. One situation when it is not a good idea is when the item to be exported costs more in import costs than it would garner in export revenues.