James Delahunty
23 Aug 2005 13:08
In a world where content holders need to protect their content as best they can, companies are often forced to part with a lot of money to license DRM technology for the purpose. Sun Microsystems Inc. is offering the digital world another gift. The company announced a project called the Open Media Commons which is aimed at creating an open-source Digital Rights Management (DRM) standard. To add to the fact that it will be open-source, it will also be completely royalty-free.
DRM effectively allows restrictions to be placed on digital content that can thwart piracy efforts. However, DRM has not gotten a warm welcome from consumers who believe that limitations on some DRM protected content are too strict. Sun Chief Operating Officer Jonathan Schwartz believes the growing number of rivals of DRM standards could stifle innovation and economic growth due to the standards being incompatible with one another.
"The industry generally falls into two camps: Those who support what we're up to and others who want to collect a fee for using their own DRM standards", Schwartz told Reuters. Analysts believe the project is ambitious. Content owners, software developers and device manufacturers need to be on board to make it work. Schwartz plans to call for cross-industry collaboration in developing the technology. He believes it is the key to the free creation, duplication and distribution of digital content.
"It's an interesting idea," Gartner G2 analyst Mike McGuire said. "But you've got a whole bunch of audiences that have to be satisfied with this." The incompatibility of DRM standards is becoming an annoyance not only to consumers but also to content providers such as major music labels. For example, Apple has been under fire for months for it's tight grip on it's FairPlay DRM technology meaning songs bought from iTunes can only be played with Apple software or on Apple devices (iPod) due to the companies failure to license FairPlay to third parties.
Also, newer copy protected CDs that contain digital files protected by DRM along with the Audio CD content are becoming more of a problem to iPod owners, as you can't store these WMA files on an iPod. If Apple wasn't so protective of FairPlay, then CDs could be made that contain digital files for iPods also.
Source:
Reuters