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Canon wants us to pay for using our own camera as a webcam

romanzipp.com

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Re: Canon wants us to pay for using our own camera as a webcam

#181
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reasons like this is why the Japanese companies are eating sh*t and are VERY interested in pushing for a US-China war just like the western companies. Everything coming out of China is way more customer friendly, usually way cheaper and getting better and better to a point that they are surpassing everything else that exists. If DJI releases a full-frame mirrorless camera with L-mount (which they are going to), Canon…

Regarding products from China being cheaper: remember that Japanese, Korean, and Western companies are the ones mostly innovating and absorbing the R&D costs. Remember how modern OLEDs were made feasible basically by LG and Samsung? Having stolen that IP[0][1][2], without any R&D costs but with dirt cheap manufacturing due to direct and indirect subsidies like relatively almost nonexistent labour protection laws, PRC…

What you say about innovation has been true mostly in the distant past and mostly for technologies that are used in business-to-business products.

For consumer products from recent years, like smartphones or computers, the vast majority of innovative products are Chinese, even if the quality or documentation is frequently subpar.

Now I see very frequently cases when US companies or Japanese companies should better start to copy the Chinese if they want to stay competitive, but instead of doing that, they push for the same kind of tariff protections for which the US heavily criticized any other country in the past and blackmailed them in various ways to force them to remove the tariff protections against US companies.

Re: Canon wants us to pay for using our own camera as a webcam

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should the manufacturer raise the price of the camera for you and me just to implement something extra OP wants that they can already do through HDMI?

They have already implemented it, otherwise it wouldn't work.

The app is part of the implementation. And they're apparently subsidizing the cost by charging separately for it.

Drop the fee and that's now baked into the camera's base price.

Re: Canon wants us to pay for using our own camera as a webcam

#183
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't they just make it taste bad, for safety's sake?

In some countries it's done so and poisoning is banned. E.g. Finland and Poland got an exemption from the EU to do this because so many people died from the poisonings.

Where can I read more about this? What poison were they using?

Re: Canon wants us to pay for using our own camera as a webcam

#185
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of when lawyers successfully argued that X-Men are not human, so that their action figures would be classified as "toys" rather than "dolls" and thus charged a lower tariff. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toy_Biz%2C_Inc._v._United_Stat...

This sort of thing happens relatively often; Sony also tried (unsuccessfully) to have the PS2 deemed a personal computer (which would have lead to 0 tariffs in the EU): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yabasic#PlayStation_2

IIRC the PS3 Linux option existed because of this same tariff.

Re: Canon wants us to pay for using our own camera as a webcam

#186
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reasons like this is why the Japanese companies are eating sh*t and are VERY interested in pushing for a US-China war just like the western companies. Everything coming out of China is way more customer friendly, usually way cheaper and getting better and better to a point that they are surpassing everything else that exists. If DJI releases a full-frame mirrorless camera with L-mount (which they are going to), Canon…

Regarding products from China being cheaper: remember that Japanese, Korean, and Western companies are the ones mostly innovating and absorbing the R&D costs. Remember how modern OLEDs were made feasible basically by LG and Samsung? Having stolen that IP[0][1][2], without any R&D costs but with dirt cheap manufacturing due to direct and indirect subsidies like relatively almost nonexistent labour protection laws, PRC…

"Long before the United States began accusing other countries of stealing ideas, the U.S. government encouraged intellectual piracy to catch up with England’s technological advances. According to historian Doron Ben-Atar, in his book, Trade Secrets, “the United States emerged as the world's industrial leader by illicitly appropriating mechanical and scientific innovations from Europe.”

Everyone is a thief.

https://www.history.com/news/industrial-revolution-spies-eur...

Re: Canon wants us to pay for using our own camera as a webcam

#187

I also discovered that I couldn't use my Canon SLR to record more than 30 minutes of video continuously. The problem however wasn't Canon, but that I lived in a region (EU) that would have imposed a customs tariff on cameras that could do that, but by keeping it under that, the camera would be classed as a 'stills' camera and so was therefore exempt. Admittedly this is different from the case in the article - but it…

Reminds me of the Indian public discourse when the government wanted to tax caramel popcorn in movie theatres at 18% when the normal ones were taxed at 5%.

Re: Canon wants us to pay for using our own camera as a webcam

#188
post #4

> However, Canon is a hardware company, not a software company, That probably makes it pretty easy to reverse engineer their software to bypass the restrictions.

> However, Canon is a hardware company, not a software company,

Canon is a company that is in the business of making profit (not just software or just hardware).

If they realize that they can charge you $1 for every time you chew gum while taking photos, and people will actually pay for that privilege $1-per-chewing-gum-session (disclaimer: chewing gum not provided) they would charge you!

Remember BMW and heating in the UK (https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-62142208)??

Getting paid $6k for a camera once is good. Getting paid another $50 a year for doing nothing is even better.

I assume the great brain who came with the idea is: "we got 10 million cameras out there, if 0.5% of those camera owners pay $50 pa, then that's 10m x 0.5% x $50 = $2.5m pa. If I could get a 100k bonus for bringing $2.5m gross to my company I would also suggest this idea.

Re: Canon wants us to pay for using our own camera as a webcam

#189

I also discovered that I couldn't use my Canon SLR to record more than 30 minutes of video continuously. The problem however wasn't Canon, but that I lived in a region (EU) that would have imposed a customs tariff on cameras that could do that, but by keeping it under that, the camera would be classed as a 'stills' camera and so was therefore exempt. Admittedly this is different from the case in the article - but it…

That requirement is reversed in the last five years IIRC. My Sony A7-III doesn't have that, for example. Neither modern Canons, AFAIK. The funnier thing is, you can't use the videos out of your camera for commercial purposes, because the video codecs inside your camera doesn't come with commercial licenses out of the box. So if you are going to use your camera for production which you'll earn money, you need to pay c…

Do you need to sign an agreement to this effect before starting filming? I don't see how it can legally hold.
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