DRM intellectual property company Intertrust, owned jointly by Sony and Philips, has issued details of licensing costs that it plans to charge to software suppliers and device makers which implement the Open Mobile Alliance DRM or use its own Marlin DRM system, running at €0.25 ($0.35) for each device.
In an effort to get more customers to sign up, it has offered a royalty holiday until next July for any device maker signing up before December this year, and PC applications suppliers have been offered a cap of $400,000 a year.
It initially announced charges for Operators back in February of 2007 after the entire market for OMA DRM stalled. That blockage was caused by a first license offer from the MPEG licensing Authority representing Intertrust, its parents, ContentGuard and Matsushita, which all claimed that some of the OMA technology relied on its patents. That was a first offer of $1.00 per customer plus $0.25 a year, which fell to $0.65 per customer, before being widely ignored by most cellular operators.
In a surprise move last February Intertrust said that its own patent base could be used for varying packages from €0.09 per year per domain ($0.12); or €0.015 per subscriber rising gently to about double that rate over 10 years.
By doing this Intertrust left operators to decide whether or not they needed the advanced Rights Expression capabilities of the Microsoft controlled ContentGuard or the other Matsushita technology license.
But the chance for Intertrust to work with OMA on the handset license may have come and gone, and many suppliers, including Nokia with its Music store, have already offered services using Microsoft’s PlayReady DRM instead.
And while Intertrust holds 90 patents and has over 200 patent applications pending for the fundamentals or DRM, key management and domain based key handling, it still has a long road to dominate the DRM landscape in terms of installed devices.
Back in February the GSM Association (GSMA) welcomed the Intertrust licensing offer, a dramatic change of heart since it had decried the high price of the MPG LA deal, and at the time called for alternative ways of handling DRM on a handset.
This time the license has been announced without the benefit of someone like the GSMA saying that it’s a good deal, and without the drumbeat of a major device maker throwing in its hand with Intertrust except that LG Electronics took a license back in March.
So far Intertrust has only landed Vodafone as an operator licensee with Telefonica saying too that it would trial Marlin which is a DRM software system in its own right. However quite a number of cellcos have begun offering services using OMA, and failure to sign up for a license this time around could result in legal moves by Intertrust.