When DRM intellectual property company Intertrust said this week that it has signed a long term patent license with Motorola, it perhaps didn’t take account of the fact that Motorola my not be with us for much longer, but let’s say the deal is as long term as Motorola is thinking right now.
But that having been said, the deal give Motorola global rights to practice to all Intertrust inventions in trusted distributed computing and digital rights management. Intertrust owns some 250 patents in trust chains, and key management and DRM interoperability and domain management.
Motorola’s license covers all products, including mobile and digital television devices which is interesting. One the one hand Intertrust has been chasing the cellular market for some time, convinced that the Open Mobile Alliance DRM produced for the cellular community, required a license from Intertrust, a move that has largely seen the OMA DRM dropped and anarchy ruling in the handset DRM market.
But on the other, the best way to sideload a portable device with video is from a set top, and potentially by licensing both devices it may mean that Motorola, the dominant cable set top maker in the US, is planning to offer features whereby cable TV can be copied from a set top to a handset under its DRM control.
The first licensee for the Intertrust patents was Microsoft, but that was after a four year court case and cost the company $440 million, since then progress has been slow, but is accelerating, with Vodafone signing up in 2005, and then LG taking a license just a year ago. Nokia has had talks with Intertrust but has instead licensed Microsoft’s PlayReady for its own Ovi mobile portal, while Telefonica has only taken a trial of Intertrust’s Marlin DRM. The most recent licensee is Adobe, which plans to use it as the basis of its Adobe Media Player and all its Flash Video players, currently not considered by Hollywood to have strong enough DRM to allow the release of premium films assets.