TechCrunch is reporting that the major US studios, with the exception of Disney are all about to endorse ‘one more push’ towards a generalized DRM system which can both support domains and multiple DRM technologies. It is being referred to as Open Market and follows on from an initiative taken by Sony Pictures earlier this year.
What TechCrunch and others are saying about this move is that Open Market is a set of policy decisions with a software and services framework that will allow interoperability of both video formats and DRM schemes.
The idea sounds rather woolly as stated and we suspect that there has been some confusion in the telling. The scheme is supposed to be officially announced later this month and will involve everyone except Disney which will stick for now with Apple’s FairPlay, from leading shareholder Steve Jobs who also controls Apple.
The Coral Consortium has had a scheme for DRM interoperability for several years now, and the DLNA said a year ago that it might endorse it as a standard, and then went terribly quiet. Coral both supports the concept of a domain and also for DRM interoperability.
But last October, after it appeared to hit a roadblock, Coral came up with some new concepts and we think it is these that are seeing the light of day here. The thing is that a single service operator, someone like Nokia or iTunes or more likely Vodafone, has always been able to run their own eco-systems with multiple DRMs, because they can have a common application decide who had rights for any given piece of content on any given device, and then trigger the release of a decryption key from any one of several DRM servers. So an OMA DRM system could run alongside a Windows Media DRM system and they never swapped decryption keys or algorithms, but simply agreed at a level above the DRM system who had access to what content. The DRM then simply enabled it.
If we take this a step further we can create a kind of ‘super operator’ or trust authority, which decides on behalf of operators who has proper access to which content. So Vodafone might allow a customer certain rights on certain devices all registered into a single domain, but also Nokia might do the same, so that a customer might download content to a mobile phone from either one, and still have the rights to spread it around his or her devices. The Nokia content might be encrypted using Microsoft PlayReady and the Vodafone content might be encrypted using CoreMedia’s OMA DRM, but these systems would then be told that it was ‘okay’ to authorize issuing of decryption keys by another application or trust agent.
Any system that allows keys to swap from one DRM to another is doomed, because hackers will attack the weakest link and achieve access to all of the DRMs in one hack. So instead the trust authority runs its applications above the DRM level and let’s the DRMs remain self contained.
When we first heard of this we suggested that the perfect pair of companies to run and manage such a Rights Locker, as well as the various mediations needed between different DRM types, were Verisign and Thomson, who are already partnered on this type of activity elsewhere, so perhaps we will see them lending a hand, or other organizations like them.
The central data element here is called a Rights Token which is a DRM-agnostic content identifier, along with a content usage model identifier, and a consumer identifier. These Rights Tokens are a way of passing information to the participating DRM systems themselves. This Eco-System was described in a Coral paper and now looks odds on to become implemented with further software focusing on managing the consumer’s personal media Ecosystem of devices, service providers and content and defining their domain of devices.
The way this shows itself to users is that they put each device online and register it when they buy it, and when they buy content the retailer registers it along with the rights sold, with the trust authority. The consumer then enjoys complete DRM freedom thereafter, as long as he or she doesn’t make too many copies or sends the content to run on an unregistered device, through something like file sharing. The beauty of all this is that the scheme can work with devices and DRMs that are already deployed and content that is already out there.
Another nice thing is that a record is kept of consumer content rights, so if users loses their copy of the content, the operator might include, as one of the rights purchase, the option to download another copy ‘ or they may not, but at least some operators can allow content persistence ‘ so you never lose your film collection.
If this is really what Sony Pictures is pushing and if most studios in the US have joined the effort, suddenly DRM will stop being a dirty word with consumers and all online content services ‘ after a brief period of teething troubles no doubt ‘ will be like Apple iTunes, portable to multiple devices, but in this case those defined by the consumer, not the content retailer.
And if Fox, Paramount, Sony, Universal and Time Warner are all on board. Along with retailers like Amazon, Target, WalMart, Comcast, MovieLink and CinemaNow (the rights tokens can refer to a DVD as much as an online copy of content) then there could be a sudden and significant change coming to the world of digital media.
Of course perhaps Open Market has nothing to do with Coral, and its technology provider Intertrust, but given that it was introduced by Mitch Singer, CTO Sony Pictures Entertainment, and Sony owns 50% of Intertrust, with Philips owning the other half, then it’s odds on that this is where the idea has come from.