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."

Comments

Patent Policy Bites U.S.?

[Michael_Burton]

The Chinese seem determined to avoid patent issues by developing their own chips, and now their own video formats.

The intellectual property laws that were supposed to guarantee our technology a dominant position may, in practice, be shutting U.S. companies out of future marketplaces, as tech customers seek a way around excessive royalties and restrictions.

Re:Patent Policy Bites U.S.?

[valisk]

our technology a dominant position may, in practice, be shutting U.S. companies out of future marketplaces, as tech customers seek a way around excessive royalties and restrictions.

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.

China better than Slashdot??

[jkrise]

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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Re:1.2 billion

[Fuyu]

According to China Population Information and Research (CPIRC), the total population in Mainland China is 1,289,646,742.

Re:Go China!

[Fuyu]

According to the Yahoo article it's not royalty-free, "Chinese manufacturers licensing that technology would pay fees in the order of one yuan ($1=CNY8.28) per device, much lower than those for MPEG, the report said. If it becomes a national standard, products of foreign companies sold in China could also have to use AVS."

Re:Piracy?

[iluvpr0n]

No, it won't. Mainland China is now separated into its own region (region 6, region 3 is used in Hong Kong, South Korea, and some other Southeast Asian countries). Anyone who is making bootleg video isn't going to play by the rules; they want to maximize the number of people they can sell to. So if you go on ebay to buy those bootleg copies of Star Wars IV - VI you won't find that they say "Region 6. Only playable in China!" It'll be the same way with this AVS format. It also assumes this technology would replace DVDs in China, which seems a bit far-stretched at this point.

Re:Yet another proprietary codec...

[Jugalator]

Xiph.org isn't only developing Ogg Vorbis, but also Ogg Theora. It's still in alpha stages though. The technology used in Theora is based on the vp3 codec which is covered by patents, but Xiph.org has negotiated an "irrevocable free license to the vp3 codec for any purpose imaginable on behalf of the public".

Xiph.org is also developing the experimental wavelet-based "Tarkin" codec. As I understand it, it's more written from "scratch", much like Ogg Vorbis, but is even further ahead in the future than Ogg Theora, which they are focusing on right now.

Re:Piracy?

[garyok]

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?

Probably Nationalism

[Phoenix666]

You see, everything the CCP does is aimed at reaffirming their legitimacy as the one and ruling party. There is a Chinese space program to go to the moon. There is a program to build a navy to rival the US's. There was their version of linux, and now there's this project.

I admire their technical prowess, but they're not doing it with the good of humanity in mind. It's all about proving that they're not trapped in luohouzhuyi, literally "fall-behind-ism." They've failed as a communist party, so now the only thing keeping them in power is trying to prove that they're making China strong enough to resist foreign interference. That's what this project feels like to me.

Re:You know you're an FOSS zealot when...

[Kosi]

Hell, we used all the nazi doctors' death-camp research didn't we?

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-fortun e- 2-09-02.html