Slashdot Mirror
China Proposes Rival Video Format
Richard Finney writes "Yahoo News is reporting that
the Chinese government is supporting an effort to develop a homegrown standard, called 'AVS,' for compressing digital audio and video in order to avoid paying royalties
on proprietary compression schemes.
The AVS groups website is online but in Chinese."
China never really has gotten over that "we are the center of the earth" mentality have they? Royalties have nothing to do with it - you're talking about the largest exporter of pirated digital media in the universe. Royalties mean nothing. This is really about continuing China's history of trying to advance their civilization without using parts of anybody else's.
Slashdot : Today's SCO news - Darl McBride wakes up, brushes teeth, SCOX down 10 cents.
China : So? We've got RedFlag Linux, we don't bother about US Copyright laws.
Slashdot: Intel settles with Via, latter not to make pin-compatible CPUs after 3 years... blah,blah,blah..
China: Here's the Dragon CPU. Forget Intel, forget Via.
Slashdot: CDMA and GSM are the top technologies for mobile phones.
China: We've developed SCDMA totally in-house. We don't pay royalties for that.
And now...
Slashdot: GIF is out of patent. Some image formats still remain in copyright and patents mess.
China: Here's our video format.
Slashdot: XBox can be hacked to run Linux.
China: Dragon CPU runs Midori Linux. We don't need any damn XBoxes..
And so on.. Slashdotters makes noise, China makes progress.
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If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
A common pool of research and market for close to 2 billion peoples, all sharing in some way a low tech - low money environment...
Open Source is the only way to go if they want to avoid royalties...
when you have one billion inhabitant, anything can become a huge problem...
I remember my economy eacher telling us why coffee was badly seen as a morning drink in china. Because if only 1/2 of your population takes one cup coffee in the day, it amounts to 50 tons a day in purely imports...
And, also, if their standard is proposed as is in all future media players (say, how many DVD players are not made in China ?) this standard could become the worlds standards...
And the whole world will have to pay royalties to China...
Ahhhn Anticipation ! 8)
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
I wonder if this would cut down on media piracy worldwide. Since Videos/DVDs on the black market in China would be in AVS Format, no other country could play them.
Who the heck do you think manufactures all the players? Chinese companies. They'll throw in AVS support for nothing with their players (no point in setting up 2 production lines when 1 will do), just like they threw in support for VCD and SVCD. And then the players will get shipped to every country in the world.
In fact, this is a real shot in the arm for piracy, as they can rip the video from DVDs, repackage it in non-region encoded AVS format. Then they fire it around the wibbly-wobbly web in handy, ready-to-burn form and their little pirate buddies with an AVS-compliant player go "Woohoo! No more swapping SVCD discs!"
But, for exactly the same reasons, it'll also be a boost for amateur and small media production companies as they won't have to pay Philips and Sony a big wad of their earnings to get their media distributed worldwide.
A better question would be: given China's intransigence when it comes to upholding international intellectual property agreements, should we rip off this format, use it for publishing everything, make tools to create and edit AVS files willy-nilly, burn AVS discs, blah, blah, blah..., and not pay them one red cent for it?
One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors - Plato
This is indeed something which I think will happen if the present US laws are allowed to stand and are perhaps extended into Europe.
There is a term for this type of regulatory aid to National Enterprises: Mercantilism
As each Block seeks to protect its own markets with regulation including copyrights and patents which favour companies from within the block versus those from elsewhere, the markets will become increasingly reluctant to innovate and as many innovations will possibly infringe on existing patents, copyrights, national protective legislation etc, overbroad and lacking in utility.
Most innovation will occur in areas where such regulations are slack in comparison.
Perversely these innovations will not benefit the large closed markets for the same reasons, and lacking in the ability to make use of these new innovations by either importing or internal manufacturing due to high Intellectual Property costs making innovations uneconomic in comparison to exisiting products and services.
It could well be that as Large Multi-National corporations take flight to less regulated economies to gain low cost labour and low cost innovation, those jobs lost will not be replaced by new jobs created via the utilisation of new innovations, in effect locking unemployment into the system.
We can follow this up with an examination of how the USPTO has been increasing the number of patents granted for seemingly spurious claims and look at the fact that the EU is considering enacting a similar set of rules, thanks to the tireless lobbying of US Corporations and US led Industry Pressure Groups, and see that if such Laws are made compatible with existing US patents and US issued patents have the same legal status as EU patents within the EU then a financial bonanza will be the reward for the lobbyists and the US economy in general.
This will however be very short-term and will likely result in an enormous amount of cross regulation where the US Coporations will face IP claims from EU Corporations designed to close out US entry to the EU marketplace and vice versa. And almost certainly an increase in the amount of Industrial Espionage in order to be first to file IP for Patents.
It becomes difficult to see why such measures could be considered useful, but in the short term view which afflicts most corporations worldwide, the opportunity to grab a legal monopoly over entire areas of innovation, potentialy bringing many billions of $ of revenue for little to no outlay, will define how our Governments regulate on these matters.
Economic Left/Right: -0.62
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -3.69
Hell, we used all the nazi doctors' death-camp research didn't we?
n e- 2-09-02.html
This goes even further, as the grandfather of the guy currently occupying your president's seat has built the family fortune by dealing with the nazis:
http://www.baltech.org/lederman/bush-nazi-fortu
Probably Frisia, too.
...) which operate largely away from public scrutiny, and which the public would frequently disavow in horror if they knew about. So my optimism is quite tempered.
Likely the government of the Orkney Islands. Possibly the government of Iceland.
Notice that those are all really small governments? That isn't happenstance. Notice that none of those countries are powerful? That isn't happenstance.
When a large amount of centralized power is available, it attracts those more interested in power than in doing the ostensible job. This is a part of what happened to ICANN. This is a repeated happening.
Many control freaks can do a good job. That's just not thier interest. So if they don't have to, they won't bother. But they will act so as to increase the amount of control that they can exercise, because that's what they're interested in. So the upper levels of successful corporations and governments tend to be infested with these psychos. (Psychopath may be too strong a word, but I can't think of a better one. Sociopath, perhaps?)
Many organizations, including governments, are founded with worthy purposes, and organized to work efficiently. But the most efficient organizations are easy for the control freaks to subvert, because they depend on the good intentions of those who work there. Checks and balences is a good consideration. That the US design secumbed to the whackos doesn't negate that. Most early designs have bugs. What it is missing is a good debugging procedure. (N.B.: The Alien and Sedition acts were among the first laws passed by Congress. So the perversion of the design didn't take long. But the built in checks and balences stabilised the system, and it recovered. Perhaps we will again, though the corrupt voting machines make me a bit dubious. And being the "pre-eimient nation" has caused the whackos to be even more interested in grabbing power, putting increased strains on the system. Another destabilizing factor is the vast increase in the powers of the executive branch since WWII. A third is the increase in the clandestine branches of government (CIA, NSA, FBI,
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
DVD players that can be modified to be region-free (usually through a remote hack) work excellently.
Region-free sometimes isn't enough, though. The ideal DVD player allows you to set it to any region, because DVDs can play tricks like trying one region, and if it plays on that, refusing to play the main content which is from another region.
In general, I've found the whole DVD script stuff to be a PITA. Often to play a disc, rather than selecting play I have to go to the "chapter select" screen and select the first chapter to get it to play the movie.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
FrankOlsonProject
and watch the show named "Code Name Artichoke" on WorldLink TV channel
10.33
Also at Kransberg Castle: Some of the leading scientific experts in Nazi Germany had been involved in biological warfare, testing the effects of deadly germs on human beings in Dachau and other concentration camps. One of them was Professor Kurt Blome. Blome was the Third Reich's Deputy Surgeon General and the man behind German research into biological weapons.
10.55
Blome will be among those charged in the case against concentration camp doctors brought before the military tribunal in Nuremberg. He will face the death penalty.
11.07
In spite of the fact that there is enough evidence against him, Kurt Blome will be acquitted in Nuremberg. The Americans have other plans for him.
11.21 Voice of Professor Kurt Blome: Untertitel
1) I stated publicly and openly that I was a conscientious National Socialist...
2) and a follower of Adolf Hitler.
11.29 Voice of Norman Cournoyer
"We were interested in anyone who did work in biological warfare. Did they want to use that? The Nazis? Yes, absolutely! They wanted to use anything that killed people. Anything!"
11.48
The Americans save Kurt Blome, seen here on the left, from death by hanging. In turn, he provides them with information about the Nazi biological weapons program. One of the specialists interrogating Blome is Donald Falconer, a friend and colleague of Frank Olson. Falconer is responsible for developing anthrax bombs.
12.12
Today, more than 50 years later, Donald Falconer lives in a convalescent home not far from Frederick.
Ron Paul