The Marlin Developer Community this week said it has established a specification which it calls ‘OMArlin’ which will act as a bridge between the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) DRM v.2.0 and Marlin DRM.
The OMArlin specification provides a simple way to build devices and services, and to package content so that OMA and Marlin DRM technologies interoperate.
The brains behind Marlin comes from DRM specialist Intertrust which has long suggested that Marlin was written with a view to interoperating with OMA. The ideal scenario is that OMA handsets will be able to freely share protected content with a Marlin device, either a PC or a consumer electronics device such as a set top or DVR.
There have been talks of bridging the PC bundled Microsoft Windows Media DRM with OMA, and OMA market leader Core Media has conducted a project for Microsoft to build such a system, but it was only supposed to be a one way transfer from the handset to the PC, not the other way around and it has not become widely available. Instead Microsoft has launched its own new DRM system for all types of handsets called PlayReady, to be delivered later this year, as a suggested replacement for OMA DRM.
Marlin is a set of building blocks for DRM construction which Intertrust hoped would mean that many varied DRM functions could be offered by using different parts of it. It has opened up the technology to its partner companies to form the Marlin Developer Community in the hope that it can also become a standard.
In 2005 Vodafone took a license to the underlying patents that Intertrust holds in DRM, and last week LG followed suit. At 3GSM, Telefonica announced that it would trial Marlin to intercommunicate with handsets.
‘Bridging Marlin and OMA is very important as it provides adopters of one standard the opportunity to leverage the resources and features of the other,’ said Emmanuel Attali, Technical Manager for DRM at Orange. ‘OMArlin provides a unified, friendly user experience for consumers using content services and service-enabled devices.’
The OMArlin specification has been developed by Intertrust, Philips, and CoreMedia with input from Orange, Vodafone, and the other Marlin founders, including Matsushita, Samsung and Sony.
The OMArlin specification will be shortly available from the Marlin Developer Community at www.marlin-community.com.