Nokia’s has made a strategic decision to partner with Microsoft over DRM, and will help what used to be its biggest rival complete its new version, PlayReady.
This was revealed yesterday by Sebastian Nystrom Director, Technology Strategy, Nokia Corporate Strategy, who likened the new openness between Nokia and Microsoft to ‘two dinosaurs dancing,’ saying that in an age of dinosaurs ‘if all of them are meat eaters, it can get very messy,’ implying that it was time to co-operate with some of its rivals.
Nystrom revealed that all of the Ovi portal, not just the Nokia Music Store, but all of the new web services which its new CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo has been taking about developing, will use PlayReady, which we assume includes its GoPlay gaming and Twango social networking where they require any DRM, and other services as yet to be launched, one of which we know is a new video store
Nystrom was speaking at the Broadband World Forum in Berlin, after Faultline principal analyst Peter White chaired a session on DRM with Nystrom and others. Chatting later Nystrom confirmed that when the work on PlayReady is complete it will support the concept of domains, where a family or group of friends may share content without it being possible to transmit this over the internet.
‘We have tried for a long time to support the OMA DRM from the Open Mobile Alliance, but the operators do not appear to want to go down that route, so we have looked elsewhere,’ said Nystrom. He gave the distinct impression that for DVB-H and in some operator cases Nokia would continue to support other DRMs, but for its own services Nokia would go with Microsoft.
This thaw in the frostiness between these two giant corporations would never have happened under the stewardship of previous Nokia CEO Jorma Ollila, who set out his stall to not give an inch to Microsoft, an attitude which is largely responsible for the aggressive control of Symbian, the launch of Series 60, and the weakness that even today Windows Mobile has in terms of market share. However new CEO Kallasvuo has shifted Nokia’s emphasis away from hardware platforms, to mobile web services, and in order to achieve that, perhaps Nokia can no longer afford to argue with Microsoft, because it has fight on its hands with Google.
‘Microsoft has understood that it doesn’t have to own the operating system on the handset to do business,’ Nystrom explained.
Interestingly our understanding of Microsoft’s rights to its own DRM technology, which is based on some patents of its own, but also on licenses it acquired from Intertrust for $440 million as the resolution of a 3 year legal battle, is that it could sell as many DRM systems as it wants, as long as it is on a Microsoft owned platform. If that is true Microsoft putting PlayReady on Symbian, Linux and other handset devices would mean this is outside that agreement and Intertrust could approach Nokia for royalties.
‘Have you seen the contract?’ asked Nystrom, ‘well I have and I can tell you that it doesn’t mention anything about platforms.’
Since those days of warring with Microsoft Intertrust has become very much an intellectual property licensor rather than a product company within DRM, offering its Nemo architecture for DRM interoperability, and an open source of pre-coded components in its Marlin DRM system, for the price of an IPR license.
Intertrust now claims to have invented and patented the concept of ‘domain based DRM,’ as well as various methods for facilitating this, but with a Nokia that is suddenly very happy to be litigious and which has taken CDMA chip vendor Qualcomm on head on in US and European courtrooms, Intertrust will have to think carefully before stepping between two dancing Dinosaurs, and insisting too aggressively that Nokia buys into its patent pool.