Other Chinese DVD player manufacturers are about to follow the path laid out by Apex earlier this year, when it agreed to pay technology licensing royalties to companies who own key patents to DVD technology (such companies include Sony and Philips).
One of the main reasons for this surprising development is China's entry to WTO. China must comply with WTO's rules over globally recognized patents, etc and this legislation seems to make Beijing government to actually force certain companies to pay the royalties to foreign companies.
To read more about the issue, visit Yahoo! Finance.
Written by: Petteri Pyyny @ 13 May 2002 12:48
Chinese DVD manufacturers to pay royalties
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A_Klingon
Pity.
And they were so proud, too, defying DVD Royalties right down to the core. But when you think about it, current, modern-day dvd standalones only cost a fraction of what they once did, royalty markups or not. It's the abhorrently unfair cost of the discs and the mega-lucrative profit$ they bring in to greedy content-providers (Hollywood) that has always bothered me.
A wag once said "Not since the advent of DVD has (s)vcd been so popular in western countries".
To combat this, I will pay the extra markup demanded for Chinese players if the player itself can comfortably offer decent playback options for formats *other* than DVD - and yes, I would really like to see mpeg-4 (or some variant of Divx) fully incorporated into dvd standalone players as a de-facto *standard*, your own recent foray into the dvd-r world notwithstanding.
Summary: The cost of the players isn't necessarily prohibitive; the costs of dvds ARE. We need alternatives.
Keep playing with that dvd burner.14.5.2002 01:02 #1
