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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
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 $30 million mentioned.
The interesting part is that that 1993 decision helped make US digital tv use dolby instead of mpeg, like they apparently use in Europe
Cogito ergo sum in Slashdot.
After reading the article, i'm a bit less outraged. The 30M$ 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).
Still guess we can't grumble as university students of today are tomorrow's politicians.
Well, I don't think MIT turns out too many politicians - they turn out exclusively scientists and engineers. If it was politicians, I wouldn't care - we know they're a bunch of scoundrels - but what is truly frightening is that the ethics of scientists are supposedly held in higher regard than those of politicians. "Bias" is a much dirtier word in science than in politics. So to have MIT students see their advdisors and teachers getting rich off of graft is a very sad thing indeed.
One more reason I'm glad I didn't go to MIT for grad school.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
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
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.
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
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.