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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...
"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/
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
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 $30 million mentioned.
The interesting part is that that 1993 decision helped make US digital tv use dolby instead of mpeg, like they apparently use in Europe
Cogito ergo sum in Slashdot.
If this was a government and not a University wouldn't we call this kind of thing bribery and corruption? Still guess we can't grumble as university students of today are tomorrow's politicians.
Soldier on over to the AVS forum and observe that lots of folks (myself included) receive ATSC DTV just fine with a simple indoor antenna.
...from what I read in the article, it seems that philips paid this guy because both of their standards were about the same, and performed the same, and they all agreed, so he accepted the payment so that MIT's work wasn't all for naught.
Which sounds like a pretty good idea to me. I mean, why have competing standards and go through all the expense of that when they're nearly the same, and one side is willing to be bought out and move on?
vk.
MIT's The Tech is actually located at http://www-tech.mit.edu/... way to check those links.
If you blog it...
Lets just stop calling this "voting" and start calling it scoring - "MIT gets paid to score for Dolby!".
Whats even worst is that they took them to _court_ over it - am i the only one that things this is disgusting? what the fuck is the point? where are we headed if we can clearly, publicly buy off votes and even bring people to court when the bribe isint paid?
After reading the article, i'm a bit less outraged. The 30M$ 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.
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
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.
Like punching someone in the dark.
I write in my journal
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.
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!
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.
...
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.
You know, nobody in the world at large gives a shit if DTS is a "cleverer" codec. They are only interested in whether things with the DTS logo sound better than things with the Dolby Digital logo.
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
Consider the economies of scale in manufacturing that one could achieve through worldwide standards. If companies didn't have to maintain and develop 3 different versions of all their digital/AV goodies, you'd probably be paying a bit less for the latest DVI camcorder, or at least, the same camcorder would be packing more features at that price point.
The intelligent claim is that DTS has greater potential than DD, which is true. The lower compression rate allows for greater frequency range. Anyone who claims that a DTS track is, by definition, superior to a Dolby Digital track, however, is an idiot. The true quality comes from the mastering of the audio.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
Maybe, but I doubt economies of scale affect things at that level. The difference in cost between producing the first one of something and the thousandth one of something is huge; that's an example of an economy of scale at work. But Sony (for example) is already producing a gazillion units each of twelve different models of camcorder, so there's probably not much savings to be had by producing three gazillion units each of only four different models.
I write in my journal
You know, not all broadcasts are terrestrial, they invented satellites in the meantime.
Which means... what? I don't see your point.
Multiple standards are a ploy by manufacturers and broadcasters to control market share....
Blah, blah, blah. You know, when you hear hoofbeats, you should think "horses," not "zebras." There are three different standards for analog TV broadcasts because the three standards were developed in different places and at different times. There was basically no reason to work together on a single worldwide standard because having one wouldn't have benefitted anybody at that time.
There are different standards for terrestrial HTDV broadcasts because, yeah, the standards were developed at different times and in different places. The Japanese had an 1125-line analog format in the 80's, I believe, but when the time came for the Americans to develop their own system, they wanted to improve on that standard. Thus, the ATSC formats transmitted over 8VSB.
Not everything is a conspiracy. Some things just evolve naturally.
I write in my journal
I think I speak for all of us here on Slashdot when I say... huh?
I write in my journal
Let us not forget that we're talking about terrestrial television broadcasts. These are line-of-sight transmissions. While it's obviously sensible to have common standards in major regions-- the US, Europe, the Pacific Rim-- having one standard for the whole planet is just not sufficiently important to justify the nightmarish amount of work that would go into arranging it.
I write in my journal
If what you say is true, then you're listening to well-mastered DTS tracks. A poorly mastered DTS track won't sound better than a very well-mastered DD track. Yes, DTS has potential for higher quality audio with better positioning, but there have been some DTS mixes that weren't any better than DD or even worse because the studio didn't bother putting any effort into the mix.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
Obviously, the people at Dolby would agree with your evaluation.
(How much did they (promise to) pay you for that opinion?)
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
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.