DVD inevitability

From: Russell McOrmond <russell _-at-_ flora.ca>
To: General Discussion <discuss (at) digital-copyright.ca>
Date: Mon, 12 Aug 2002 11:05:28 -0400 (EDT)

On Saturday, August 10, 2002 at 15:44, Michael Richardson 
wrote re "Re: [d@DCC] RE: discuss-digest V1 #187 " saying:

>   There would be DVDs, as the CDrom was getting too small for computer data use.
>   in fact, I'd like to suggest that if not for the millions of computers that
> were shipped with DVD players, that the Movie-DVD would have flopped.

On Sun, 11 Aug 2002 16:38:50 -0400 "Tom Trottier" <Tom@Abacurial.com> 
wrote:

> DVDs are much cheaper and faster to manufacture than videos, and hold 
> HDTV signals. They, or something like them, were inevitable.


  I think too many things are getting confused here.  The question is not
whether Digital Versatile Disks (larger CD disks), and putting MPEG (or
Video OBject - VOB files)  on them was inevitable.

  The question is whether or not the questionable DVD-CSS system, the 
claimed proprietary encoding format for VOB files licensed exclusively 
from the DVD-CCA cartel, was inevitable (legal, required, whatever...)

  We are talking about one change made to the files which adds absolutely
nothing to the technology, but allowed a cartel to license the third-party
DVD player market and thus exert control that in better-understood (by
legislators and courts) market would be declared illegal under competition
law.

  Hollywood claims that DVD-CSS is required to control their content, and 
otherwise they wouldn't release movies.  I see no merit at all to their 
claim, and even if they had delayed their adoption of the technology it 
would not have been an option for their businesses to ignore the 
technology.



  There is a huge difference between the technological advancement that
DVD represents, and the attack on technological advancement which DVD-CSS
represents.

> Tom
---
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