SideSpace releases open source DRM solution April 2, 2003 By Bill Rosenblatt
SideSpace
Solutions released Media-S,
an open-source DRM solution. Media-S is format-independent,
though the first release only supports the Ogg Vorbis open-source
audio codec.
As recently as last year, one would have thought that
"open source" and "digital rights management"
were oxymoronic. The World Wide Web consortium, for example,
has taken the view that DRM is antithetical to open
software. It just goes to show that for all the talk about
the commercial world embracing open-source software (Linux,
Apache, etc.), the reality is that the commercial and open-source
worlds are converging toward each other. Recall that
"open source" used to be known as "free
software" and have Marxist overtones.
SideSpace's Media-S is at least the second open-source DRM
implementation available, the other being OpenIPMP
from ObjectLab, which was released two months ago. Whereas
OpenIPMP is based on standards related to DRM, including MPEG-4
and ODRL, Media-S is based merely on XML and an open-source
version of SSL for security. It is a straightforward DRM
architecture that separates licenses from content, uses a
combination of user and device authentication, and appears to
support "play" rendering rights only, meaning that it is
only useful for audio and video formats in its current form.
In 1998, this author heard Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy say,
in a meeting, that DRM would eventually be
"freeware." It's unclear whether he meant
open-source software or simply that the market would not value DRM
enough for anyone to pay for it. The Linux community is
making the latter statement more and more true for operating
systems; perhaps Media-S, OpenIPMP, and similar efforts will make
it true for DRM. It would certainly help move the DRM
industry forward if a way were found to obviate anyone's need to
make money from it. Both Media-S and OpenIPMP require lots
of further development before their functionalities become of
interest for mass deployment, but part of the beauty of open
source is that there could be many developers ready to help get it
done.
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