Petteri Pyyny
19 Nov 2002 14:57
DVD6C, a consortium that owns the key patents related to the DVD Forum approved technologies, such as DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD-RAM and DVD-Audio, announced yesterday that it expects to start global licensing for its patents by 1st of January, 2003.
Patent owners in the consortium are AOL TimeWarner, Hitachi, IBM, Matsushita, Mitsubishi, Toshiba and JVC. DVD6C offers a one-stop licensing for companies willing to use the DVD patents owned by its member companies. Consortium also announced the licensing fees for various products.
The licensing price for DVD-R/RW/RAM media will be $0.075 per disc or 4% of the net selling price, whichever is greater. For DVD recorders -- both PC drives and stand-alone recorders -- the licensing fees will be 4% of the net selling price or $6.00, whichever is greater. The consortium also happens to hold the patents to DVD-Video and DVD-ROM discs and the licensing fees for these are $0.065 per disc.
DVD6C also set the new licensing fees for DVD-Video encoders and read-only DVD players and DVD-ROM drives -- all of those products are licensed by DVD6C. The group hopes that by clarifying the licensing fees it can finally crush the competition coming from the Philips-led DVD+RW Alliance.
Source: Yahoo!