Patent holder support - Blu-ray vs. HD DVD

[joeorc]

PATENT HOLDERS:

Blu-Ray:

Significant Progress Made Toward Creation of Joint Blu-ray DiscTM Patent License
Fourth Meeting of Patent Holders Held
(Chevy Chase, Maryland USA - 21 February 2007) - MPEG LA announced today that the fourth meeting of essential Blu-ray DiscTM patent owners, currently consisting of 18 companies, was held in New York on February 6-7 for the purpose of creating a joint license providing fair, reasonable, non-discriminatory access to essential patents, as an alternative to negotiating separate licenses. Significant progress has been made in identifying licensing terms for Blu-ray DiscTM products such as players, recorders, drives, software, recordable discs and prerecorded discs. Participating companies include CyberLink Corporation; Dell Inc.; Hewlett-Packard Company; Hitachi Ltd.; Koninklijke Philips Electronics N.V.; LG Electronics Inc.; Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd. (Panasonic); Mitsubishi Electric Corporation; Pioneer Corporation; Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd.; Sanyo Electric Co., Ltd.; Sharp Corporation; Sonic Solutions; Sony Corporation; TDK Corporation; Victor Company of Japan, Ltd.; and Warner Home Video Inc.

NOW HD DVD's:




First Meeting of HD DVD Patent Holders Held
Initial Group of 16 Makes Progress in Effort to Create Joint Patent License

(Chevy Chase, Maryland USA – 4 October 2007) – MPEG LA announced today that the first meeting of essential HD DVD patent owners, currently consisting of 16 companies, was held in Los Angeles on September 11 for the purpose of creating a joint license providing fair, reasonable, non-discriminatory access to essential patents, as an alternative to negotiating separate licenses. Initial participating companies include LG Electronics Inc.; Microsoft Corporation; Mitsubishi Electric Corporation; NEC Corporation; Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd.; SANYO Electric Co., Ltd.; Sonic Solutions; Thomson Licensing; Toshiba Corporation; Victor Company of Japan, Ltd.(JVC); and Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Inc.

“MPEG LA applauds the extraordinary cooperation of so many diverse companies working together to come up with an efficient way for users of the multitude of patents employed in HD DVD devices, discs and related implementations to address their licensing needs,” said MPEG LA CEO Larry Horn. “And the substantial progress made in this initial meeting bodes well for achieving it.”

MPEG LA, on behalf of essential patent owners, welcomes the input and views of interested parties, including potential licensees, in all related industry sectors. The objective is for the license to reflect both relevant conditions in the marketplace and the value of the licensed technology in order to strike a balance between patent users’ interest in reasonable access to this advanced optical disc technology and patent holders’ interest in a reasonable return on their research and development investment that enables a joint license to be offered for the convenience of the marketplace as an alternative to negotiating separate licenses.

Additional patent holder meetings are planned, and work on the joint license will continue. MPEG LA welcomes any party that believes it has patents which are essential to the HD DVD standard to submit them for evaluation of their essentiality by MPEG LA’s patent evaluators and participate in the joint license creation process if determined to be essential. Further information, along with terms and procedures governing patent submissions, can be found at http://www.mpegla.com/pid/hddvd/. While only issued patents that are essential to the HD DVD standard will be included in the license, in order to participate in the license development process, patent applications with claims that their owners believe are essential to the HD DVD standard and likely to issue in a patent also may be submitted for an evaluation of essentiality.

http://www.mpegla.com/news.cfm

look at what companies are on both formats holding patents....

[crackinhedz]

eh...help me out, I dont get it?

[doctorsteve]

warner is the important one...

[joeorc]

Originally Posted by doctorsteve

warner is the important one...

yes they are but DELL and HP are very important also which both hold Patents in Blu-Ray .

[joeorc]

Originally Posted by crackinhedz

eh...help me out, I dont get it?

look at the highlighted in red for the patent holders of each format notice who holds patents on each format......

[Merlins]

Exclude all companies that hold patent in both formats and you get this:

Blu-ray:
CyberLink Corporation
Dell Inc.
Hewlett-Packard Company
Hitachi Ltd.
Koninklijke Philips Electronics N.V.
Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd. (Panasonic)
Pioneer Corporation
Sharp Corporation
Sony Corporation
TDK Corporation

HD-DVD:
Microsoft Corporation
NEC Corporation (Have a joint venture with Sony, Sony NEC Optiarc, for optical drives... Have only produced Blu-ray drives.)
Thomson Licensing (Neutral company and a founding member of BDA)
Toshiba Corporation

But Blu-ray is missing one company from the 18 that hold patents and HD-DVD is missing 5 from the 16 that hold patents. Only the 11 initial companies are listed.

[Papi4baby]

HP can shove they POS HDDVD laptops where the sun dont shine, end of rant.

[SS316SRV]

I guess that I am missing the irony here to.

[tron3]

Originally Posted by SS316SRV

I guess that I am missing the irony here to.

All I can see is HD DVD has some very powerful top notch names, and BD has other top notch names, some lesser known, and yet we are still king of the hill.

I had to chuckle to see Sanyo in the HD DVD camp. I mean, how long since I saw a Sanyo commericial - 20 years? "Say that's life. Saaaaan-yoooooo" What are they doing other than riding the coat tails of success?

I know, I am picking on them. I'm sure someone will rebuke my playful kidding.

[SS316SRV]

Originally Posted by tron3

All I can see is HD DVD has some very powerful top notch names, and BD has other top notch names, some lesser known, and yet we are still king of the hill.

I had to chuckle to see Sanyo in the HD DVD camp. I mean, how long since I saw a Sanyo commericial - 20 years? "Say that's life. Saaaaan-yoooooo" What are they doing other than riding the coat tails of success?

I know, I am picking on them. I'm sure someone will rebuke my playful kidding.

Fair enough. I just didn't see it before. I would also like to say that just because we don't know the names doesn't that they are not huge companies and very important.

[joeorc]

Originally Posted by SS316SRV

I guess that I am missing the irony here to.

the irony is NEC:
WHY :

POINT 1:
Press Release

*****For immediate use August 29th, 2002
Toshiba and NEC Jointly Propose Next Generation, High Capacity, Blue-Laser DVD Format


Tokyo-Toshiba Corporation and NEC Corporation today jointly proposed to the DVD Forum a next-generation, high-capacity, blue-laser DVD format that will allow manufacturers to continue to use existing DVD plant and equipment and so minimize the investment required for the transition to next-generation DVD players and drives. Adoption of the proposed format will bring benefits to hardware and software developers, manufacturers and consumers.

The format proposed by Toshiba and NEC covers both read-only discs that are used to distribute high-definition movies, and read-and-write discs. The format utilizes a short wavelength blue laser and the same disc technology used in current DVDs-back-to-back bonding of two 0.6mm thick, 120mm discs.

The proposed format increases the capacity of read-only discs to 15GB for a single-sided, single-layer disc, and to 30 GB for a single-sided dual-layer disc, and pushes the capacity of read-and-write discs, which currently are single-sided with a single-layer, to 20GB. Today's single-sided dual-layer read-only discs have a capacity of 8.5 GB, while read-and-write discs (single-sided, single-layer only) can store up to 4.7GB of data. The increased capacity of the proposed format is achieved by employing a blue laser, and by utilizing the two companies' new signal-processing and phase-change media recording technologies.

In addition, Toshiba and NEC will shortly propose a 40GB single-sided, dual-layer read-and-write disc to the DVD Forum.

http://www.nec.co.jp/press/en/0208/2901.html

POINT 2:

APR 3rd 2006

http://www.sonynec-optiarc.com/

point 3: "and here is the ironic part"

The "HD DVD Promotion Group"

this is whats funny:
"the next DVD standard"
Vice-Chair Company-Memory-Tech Corporation, NEC Corporation

http://www.hddvdprg.com/eng/about/member.html

so lets look at this:
1)the other company that helped Toshiba create the "HD DVD format"
2)who sits as the VICE-CHAIR of the HD DVD promotional group
3) who now only makes Blu-RAY optical drives
4) and the fact that even now NEC still sits on the HD DVD promotional groups vice-chair but does not make HD DVD optical drive's...hmmm

thats IRONIC

[Elandyll]

HP seems to have switched sides at the last minute in 2005 (probably under MS's pressure) when it tried to have the BDA drop BD-J(which HP itself helped develop with Sun) in favor of Microsoft's Interactive language.
The BDA refused (BD-J offering more open platform interface and easier programming) and then HD in retaliation sided with HD DVD/Microsoft.

So, we can probably replace HP by Sun Microsystems instead (creators and suporters of Java)...
HP isn't a founding member of HD DVD for all that, only an opportunist that bent under MS's pressure (dropping support on their -OWN- language ).