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This topic comprises 3 pages: 1 2 3
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Author
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Topic: GDC sues Dolby over TMS and 3D audio interoperability
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Carsten Kurz
Film God
Posts: 4340
From: Cologne, NRW, Germany
Registered: Aug 2009
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posted 04-13-2016 09:15 AM
Well placed around CinemaCon:
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/future-digital-cinema-may-be-882944
---- While Oracle is about to square off against Google in a $9 billion trial over copyrighted Java API code, the entertainment industry is witnessing its own cutting-edge dispute over interoperability codes now being used in the digital cinema industry. As theater owners across the country continue to switch from the use of physical film prints to entirely digital systems, a lawsuit was filed Monday by GDC Technology Limited against Dolby Laboratories. The plaintiff counts itself as one of the largest sellers of software and hardware to theater owners, and it has a system that has been installed on approximately 40,000 screens worldwide that allows video and audio content to be stored and played. To bring motion pictures like Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice to fans, digital cinema systems rely upon media servers, sound processors, projectors and maybe most essentially, software that contains the messages and commands that tie everything together. "There is nothing secret about these interoperability codes," states GDC's complaint filed in California federal court. "For years market participants, including GDC and Dolby, have readily shared their interoperability codes and related information with one another.... Were the market participants to not share this information, they would make it more difficult to sell their products to theater owners, whose needs may be better served by buying the four basic digital cinema components from different manufacturers and sellers, or in different combinations." According to the lawsuit, Dolby shared its codes "enthusiastically" and without license for years, but once it acquired a media server manufacturer called Doremi, it decided it would no longer do so. The change in position allegedly not only benefited its newly owned subsidiary, but also enhanced the prospect of Dolby's theater sound system called Atmos, which went head-to-head with a GDC licensed immersive sound system called DTS:X. Dolby is said to be claiming intellectual property rights in the interoperability codes to "pressure" customers, notifying GDC "that its protocols and interconnection codes are subject to copyright and other unspecified intellectual property rights. Further, Dolby demanded that GDC refrain from telling GDC’s customers that GDC has the right to use Dolby’s interconnection codes." GDC says Dolby knows very well that interoperability codes are "not protectable forms of intellectual property," pointing to dozens of digital cinema related works registered by Dolby that don't assert coverage for those codes. And even if that's not true, GDC says it "is engaged in fair use," that it writes its own software code and that the only element being used from Dolby are the messages and commands being used by other participants in the industry. The plaintiff, represented by Robert Schwartz at Irell & Manella, is now in court seeking declaratory relief that the codes don't constitute copyrighted subject matter nor trade secrets and that Dolby should be held liable for tortious interference and unfair competition. Read the entire complaint. We've reached out to Dolby and will add any statement. ---
- Carsten
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 04-13-2016 11:21 AM
Interesting that GDC wants the case decided by a jury (final page of complaint). Unless they are able to select a jury consisting of at least some IT and/or a/v technology professionals, I'd have thought that there is a significant risk that jurors wouldn't understand (or at least, fully understand) the evidence they were being given, and therefore make the wrong call.
For the last few years or so before I left Britain, there were regular calls by defense lawyers in medical negligence and complicated financial cases (criminal ones) for them either to be tried by a judge alone, or for the jury to be restricted to qualified professionals in those areas, who pointed to what they argued were major miscarriages of justice in the past. Those calls didn't go anywhere, but my understanding is that the issue is still live.
In terms of the case itself, I wonder what Dolby's defense will be? The obvious one I can think of is that under the relevant precedents and/or statutes, the codes are copyrightable IP, that choosing to allow competitors to use them in the past is not the same thing as releasing them into the public domain, and therefore that the law allows Dolby simply to change its mind on that at any given point in time, whether their competitors like it or not.
A lot of the text of that complaint says, in effect, "Dolby co-operated with us in the past, they aren't now, and we think that's unfair." Unless there is specific case law that does actually establish that sharing those codes is a one-way ticket (i.e. that you can't revoke the right to use them later), I wouldn't have thought that this would hold a lot of water.
The claim also made assertions, without any evidence to back them up, about the claimed superiority of DTS:X over Atmos (no figures for the number of installations, for example, whereas there are for server sales). If this becomes a serious issue in the trial, it will surely become established pretty quickly that no-one's immersive audio system has achieved mass-rollout, mainly because of the cost of rewiring auditoria, not the competing features of the formats and players themselves. In a way, that makes the existence of this lawsuit interesting, because it indicates GDC's belief that this market is growable. Would they be bothering to sue Dolby if they'd concluded that immersive sound is effectively a stillborn technology?
It'll be interesting to see how this one pans out, to put it mildly.
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