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Chinese DVD Makers Sue Over Royalties
Viceice writes "Afterdawn.com and DigiTimes are among many other news outlets reporting that DVD player makers from China are suing the 3C DVD Patent Group over royalties on patents held by the consortium. The suit accuses 3C alliance for price-fixing, unlawful tying of essential and non-essential patents together, group boycott and conspiracy to monopolize. According to the Chinese companies, typically U.S. patent licensing fees for other products are between 3 and 5 percent of the item's wholesale price, compared to the 50 percent for DVD players."
It's obvious that the 3C Patent Group is guilty, but then... that's how things work in the western world, and such acts are protected by local governments.
I only see this as the chinese companies trying to defend their position, nothing more. They want to be competitive, even more than they already are.
What does it say about the times we are in that the greatest champions of intellectual property freedoms are the constituents of the biggest dictatorship of the world?
Just because the Chinese government is a murderous fascist 800-pound gorilla, and it is increasingly beginning to decide that Chinese industry shouldn't have to be burdened by the limitations of western patents. After all, since China is not going to become a research and development hub as long as they pursue the whole "stalinism lite" thing and all their best and brightest continue leaving for American universities, it isn't like China is benefiting from the patent regime at all. So why not just start ignoring it whenever it gets inconvenient?
We've already seen this with the Red Dragon chip; this DVD thing may be the next big crack in the wall. Once Chinese industry is unburdened by patents, the rest of the world is going to have some other way to compete than government-granted monopolies on ideas in order to keep up.
The summary is a bit misleading- the 3C group charges $20 per DVD player, not 50% of the cost. Although $20 may end up being 50% of the cost of a DVD player, a $100 DVD player still only has to pay $20. Their argument of "but everyone else does it this way" sounds like whining that they can't make $5 DVD players.
Maybe part of the reason the 3C is charging a flat fee is to prevent Chinese companies from severely undercutting their own offerings. They do have the patents on some DVD stuff, and I'm sure it's more than just worthless software patents. When you get a patent, part of the rights that you get is to prevent other people form using them, or making them pay a price of your choosing to use it.
Maybe, this lawsuit could also be an opportunity to challenge their forcing the use of CSS (and regions) (in violation of the DVD video standard, misleading-advertsing laws and anti-trust laws) on most films to further their monopoly.
Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley
[This post is in the public domain (copyright-free) unless otherwise stated]
A Chinese company pushing for consumer rights.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
I have mixed feelings about "intellectual property freedom". Thus far, the only thing China is really good at is copying and making things very cheap. I really don't think they innovate, because there is seems to be no incentive to do so. It takes too much time and effort to make a "better mousetrap" if you will, and so little time and effort to copy that it isn't worth it unless there is some protection on the design
I don't like how US patents are abused, but I don't think doing away with patents will fix anything. You'd need a constitutional ammendment to do that anyway.
You cannot build a CD or DVD device without licensing technology from Japan. Or even a VCR, as Go Video found. American companies no longer own the key consumer electronics technologies.
Believe it or not, the world still existed before 1900. Ever hear of Francis Cabot Lowell? In the early 1800s Britain's industry had some of the best industrial technology in the world, and they viciously protected their trade secrets, trying to make sure that no one else could get hold of their stuff. Francis Cabot Lowell around 1810 wanted to start some modern textile mills in New England, so he went over to England, got a job in a textile mill, examined the machines until he understood them, reverse-engineered the schematics and then memorized them, and came back to New England knowing how to build them himself. This is how the powered loom came to North America, It was the first example of industrial espionage in history that I'm aware of.
If you look at the period during which the U.S. began its rise as an international economic power-- not the post-Reconstruction period during which it had already completed that rise, which is where Edison existed-- you see LOTS of examples of stuff like this, over multiple areas of intellectual property. Witness Charles Dickens' desperate attempts to get America's book publishers to actually respect his copyrights...
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
I really don't think they innovate
This is wrong on many levels.
The barrier to implementing research in China is much lower than in the rest of the developed world. Not only in an industrial sense, but in almost every field. Check out the foreign investment and developments in Beijing. People who think that China is just another cheap labour base are not taking in the big picture.
A professor was telling me that one of his collegues in China has graduate students willing to work 14 hour days 7 days a week, and lining up at his door to get a position in his lab. Contrast this with the declining number of graduate students (and the lack of funding for) in many fields in North America.
Now that we have globalization these patents really only help the management crust of the corporations. Everything else will get outsourced if it optimizes the finances, barring the so called "federal" corporations who are heavily subsidized by the government. Welcome to the new global community.
UBU