DVD patent fees are superimposed on each other. Domestic disk drive enterprises survive in adversity 2009- 10-24 12:03 There is a saying in the industry: "It is better to sell DVD than cabbage." The progress of industrial design and its mature application in the optical drive industry have gradually become the lifeline of the optical drive industry. Patent fee has always been a pain in the heart of domestic disk drive enterprises. Following the dust of collecting patent fees from 3C Alliance last year, since September 1 this year, the authorized consortium of DVD6C has once again pointed its finger at China disk drive enterprises and started to license the core patents of DVD audio and high-end recordable DVD products globally. At the same time, patent fees will be collected from next June 1. The patent fees of 3C and 6C are constantly on the shoulders of domestic disk drive enterprises. Domestic disk drive enterprises with lower and lower profits are not discouraged, and the huge export disk drive market makes them unwilling to give up. Between the patent fee and the huge market attack, domestic disk drive enterprises are painful and happy. On September 1 day, seven companies, including time warner Inc., Hitachi, IBM, Panasonic, Mitsubishi, Toshiba and JVC (referred to as DVD6C), began to license the core patents of DVD audio and recordable DVD products worldwide. In addition, seven Japanese and American companies also said that while granting the patent right to use DVD recorders, they will start collecting patent fees from June 5438+ 10 next year. This time, the charging range of DVD6C is expanded again, which will include two parts: drive and medium. Specific products include DVD- audio, DVD Random Access Memory, DVD-RW and DVD-R .. These products will face the highest royalty of $8 per set, while the royalty of DVD audio discs will be reduced to $0.05 per set from June 65438+ 10/in 2004, and the royalties of other products will be consistent with the patent fee standards promulgated last time. In addition, the patent fee for the DVD burner will be 4% of the selling price or $6, whichever is higher. Profits often fall. Before the new project was patented by 6C this time, starting from this year, an additional patent fee of $9 will be paid to 3C and 6C Alliance for each domestic DVD exported, while the export price is only $60 to $80, and the domestic DVD will also be paid the patent fee. Overlapping patent fees and DVD prices have dropped again and again, and the profits of disk drive enterprises are getting lower and lower. Now there is a saying in the industry: "It is better to sell DVD than to sell cabbage." According to insiders, at present, the profit of each DVD is only about 5 yuan. Although a series of patent fees will be levied, the price of DVD will not go up. According to relevant sources of TCL, before the royalties of 3C and 6C were collected, these royalties were handed over to 3C and 6C alliance by upstream suppliers such as movement and laser head. At present, 3C and 6C consortia want to charge royalties to DVD manufacturers. As a result of negotiations between domestic DVD manufacturers and patent consortia, the patent fees are paid by manufacturers now, but the patent consortia are required to charge less or no patent fees from upstream suppliers to reduce the prices of products supplied by upstream, so charging patent fees will not affect the prices of products. According to industry analysis, with the downward adjustment of movement price in the second half of this year, the price of DVD player is expected to decrease. Never give up, the profit is getting smaller and smaller, but the major disk drive manufacturers still give up, and new high-end products continue to come out. Why invest heavily when you know you can't make much money? An insider of TCL unveiled the mystery: although the profit of a single DVD is very low, the market demand is huge, and the profit is still considerable after mass production. In the whole household appliance industry, China's DVD industry is the only factory in the world. At present, DVD made in China has accounted for more than 70% of the global production. Last year, China exported more than 70 million sets of DVDs, with an export value of $3.5 billion. According to TCL sources, there are more than 2,000 patents on DVD. For China disk drive enterprises without patent, under the condition that the market standard is controlled by others, they should make breakthroughs in other aspects, especially in the application technology of the products themselves. ———————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————— China color TV is charged a patent fee of $0/0 per set by foreign countries. How much royalty does China have to pay for exporting color TV sets to the United States? Last Friday, the China Chamber of Commerce for Import and Export of Mechanical and Electrical Products disclosed in its latest report on patent distribution of color TV sets in the United States that at present, foreign patentees have formally requested to sign a license agreement with China color TV enterprises and put forward the asking price-the total amount of patent fees charged for each color TV set has exceeded 10 US dollars.
In the first ten months of 2006, China exported 1, 28 1.6 million sets, up 38% year-on-year. Wang Bingke, deputy director of the Economic System Reform and Economic Operation Department of the Ministry of Information Industry, said at the "2006 China Digital TV Industry Terminal Product Development Forum" that in 2006, the output of color TVs in China reached 90 million, accounting for about 50% of the world's output.
The expansion of the export scale of color TV sets has attracted patentees from many countries, such as Tri-VI-sion, Sony, Thomson and moon pool. , filed a patent claim with China color TV enterprises, demanding payment of patent fees. The Federal Communications Commission of the United States previously announced that color TVs exported to the United States from March 1 2007 must comply with ATSC? Advanced Television Standards Committee? Formulate standard technical specifications. And it is a patent with technical specifications. For example, Sony, which just merged into ATSC, has only four core technologies? Mainly digital interface and POD module technology? However, its patent fee is very high, and the charging mode is 600 yen per color TV plus 2% of the total operating income, which is equivalent to charging at least 7 dollars per TV.
According to the Analysis Report on the Patent Distribution of American Color TV, according to the preliminary search, there are tens of thousands of patent projects involving TV technology, and there are about 1353 patents involving LCD and plasma TV in the patent literature. The main aspects involved in the patent are liquid crystal display, display panel, thin film transistor, distributor, color filter, video processing system, receiving system, tuner, decoder, shielding function, chip, speaker, set-top box, closed captioning, character superposition, picture-in-picture, satellite reception, signal reception, channel selection/retrieval/identification function and so on.
A breakdown of patent fees learned from China National Intellectual Property Administration in June 5438+February last year shows that the patent fees for exporting color TV sets to the United States from March 2007 may be as high as $23 per set, but the official has not confirmed this. It was not until this report on the distribution analysis of American color TV patents that the asking price of foreign patentees was disclosed for the first time.
Based on this severe challenge, Wang Bingke warned at the unified forum that domestic enterprises should pay attention to the issue of US levying patent fees on China color TV sets. According to the reporter's understanding, in order to reduce the impact of patent fees on China's color TV exports, many domestic color TV manufacturers have changed their previous situation of fighting in isolation. Among them, 13 color TV enterprises have basically reached the intention of building a digital TV patent pool, and are preparing to set up a joint venture patent company in order to partially offset the patent fees paid by each other and maintain the export competitiveness of China color TV. According to insiders, the lack of patented technology has been the main problem that puzzles China's color TV industry from big to strong. How to break through the bottleneck of core patent technology and establish their own right to speak has become the threshold that China color TV enterprises must cross when going abroad.