The DMP is an independent standards initiative that was started by Leonardo Chiariglione, the founder of MPEG, in September 2003.  Dr. Chiariglione gave up his position at Telecom Italia and became an independent consultant so that he could leverage his high profile toward solving large problems that he perceived in the DRM world: interoperability among closed systems; disruption of the balance of control over usage among content owners and consumers; and the potential neglect of what DMP calls Traditional Rights Usages (TRUs) -- content usages that consumers have enjoyed in the pre-digital era and therefore have come to expect in the digital world, irrespective of whether or not those usages are guaranteed by law.

Our biggest question surrounding the DMP has been about its practical value in the market, beyond that of an intellectual exercise.  Standards initiatives in DRM have always been inherently problematic due to the combination of the complexity of DRM and the rapidity with which the digital media market is developing.  There are tradeoffs between generality and likelihood of market acceptance.  DRM standards initiatives often aim at a particular emerging market segment as participants hope that their timing makes them neither premature nor too late to prevent proprietary technologies from rendering them irrelevant; Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) DRM is a rare example of one that appears to have gotten its timing and scope right.

The DMP, cognizant of these (and other) characteristics of standards initiatives through long experience, has chosen to focus on the emerging world of portable devices.  IDP-1 specifically addresses the subset of portable devices that depend on connections to other, more powerful devices -- such as PCs -- for the network connectivity required to obtain licenses to content and perform various types of authentication. 

Architecture

IDP-1 is actually just one piece of an overall framework that the new set of documents defines, one that purports to cover a broader swath of the digital value chain than any other DRM standard -- broader, for example, than OMA DRM 2.0.  The framework defines entities and interactions all the way from the originator of a piece of intellectual property (in the most abstract sense) through to the end consumer, and various well-considered steps in between. 

The Architecture document, for example, represents the effort that the DMP has put into nailing down the tricky concepts of works and the forms they take, such as particular manifestations (e.g., performances) and instances (e.g., files containing those performances).  These concepts have bedeviled other standards bodies, particularly those focused on the alphabet soup of content identifiers (URN, DOI, GRid, ISAN, ISWC, UMID, etc., etc.).  The DMP establishes these principles well enough to enable them to define a "DMP End-to-End Value Chain" and explicitly (and wisely) leaves further elaboration out of scope. 

However, the Use Cases on which IDP-1 is based reflect the fact that the DMP's membership contains no representation from major content owners, whose blessing will ultimately be needed to give its work-product any market impact.  The basic philosophy of the DMP is that the entire digital media value chain requires digital "governance" in order to ensure that all parties involved can be treated fairly, and that today's DRM technologies are doomed to fail because they do not adequately take consumers' needs or TRUs into account; consumers will ultimately vote with their feet and wallets.  Accordingly, the scenarios in the Use Cases document are primarily those that fill "holes" in the capabilities of existing DRM technologies; in particular, those that represent the needs of consumers and independent content creators. 

IDP-1 Specification

As for the particulars of the IDP-1 design: they are primarily derived -- unsurprisingly, given Dr. Chiariglione's background -- from MPEG-21 standards.  In fact, IDP-1 is one of the first complete DRM specs based on MPEG-21.

IDP-1 calls for the use of content identification schemes that conform to the MPEG-21 Digital Item Declaration (DID) framework, though it does not specify any particular ID standard.  It defines a subset of the MPEG-21 File Format as its DMP Content Format (DCF).  It incorporates a rights expression language (REL) that is an extended subset of the ISO MPEG REL (with Standard and Multimedia Extensions), which in turn was derived from ContentGuard's XrML 2.0.  IDP-1 also employs the MPEG IPMP framework, which specifies how to associate content with rights information, license issuance services, and other rights-related metadata. 

Other elements of the IDP-1 technology include 128-bit AES (US government standard) encryption for content, X.509 digital certificates, and various other XML-related standards.

Interestingly, the spec includes authentication mechanisms for devices and domains (groups of devices), but not for users.  There is no way to define a user identity, let alone associate it with a device or domain (to establish device ownership).  It is possible that the DMP considered user identity management to be unnecessary or too complex for use with the kinds of portable devices envisioned for Phase 1.

Beyond that, the spec contains a number of notions that make it au courant with the principles of modern DRM implementations and emerging home-networking paradigms, including: the option to keep licenses separate or bundle them with content -- thus supporting both network-based and physical-media distribution -- and digital signature-based trust authorities.

The next steps in the DMP's work plan include development of a reference implementation of IDP-1, and it is asking for contributions of existing (as well as new) technology toward that effort.  The DMP has decided to allow contributions under RAND licensing terms, again echoing MPEG policy.  Given the volatile state of DRM patents these days, this was a reasonable and, yes, practical choice.  The DMP also intends to map its exhaustive collection of TRU definitions to its technology spec; more on that shortly.

At this point, the IDP spec covers little that proprietary solutions don't already do -- in particular, Microsoft's Windows Media DRM 10 for Portable and Network Devices. For all of the effort that went into, and technical soundness of, the IDP-1 specs, the DMP still has to find any practical application for its work.  We can see various opportunities for this work as well as some serious limitations. 

Opportunities and Limitations

We don't envision consumer device makers rushing out immediately to implement this spec into their products -- even though a few important ones, including JVC and Matsushita, are DMP members.  Instead, we see the biggest opportunity for this work as related to consumer advocacy. 

We imagine that the DMP is sympathetic -- as we are -- to consumer advocacy organizations that espouse the idea that DRM is necessary and that it can and should be used in a fair and responsible way.  (And we admire how the DMP's philosophy takes this argument a step further by predicting that market forces will eventually harm those who do not implement fair and reasonable DRM.)  Examples of such organizations in the US include Public Knowledge and Center for Democracy and Technology.  The DMP's specs, especially once they are linked with TRU definitions, could be an excellent tool for such organizations to use in evaluating actual DRM-based content services -- perhaps in collaboration with a consumer product ratings service like Consumers Union.   

Another opportunity relates to patent pooling.  There is a need for a truly independent organization to establish a reference architecture on which to base DRM patent pools, so as to help straighten out the unholy mess that currently surrounds DRM patents.  MPEG LA (not related to MPEG, other than that it was originally founded to license patents that read on MPEG compression standards) is currently trying to fill that role, but it may not survive the current firestorm of controversy surrounding it.  Nevertheless, the fact that MPEG LA is also a member of DMP may well facilitate this process.

Beyond that, DMP has work to do.  The problem is that little in DMP's newly released set of documents convinces us that its specs are well positioned, so far, to solve many of the high-level problems with DRM (mentioned above) that they cite. 

First of all, not much in these specs truly addresses the problem of DRM interoperability.  As Dr. Chiariglione well knows, just publishing another DRM spec, no matter how broad, does not solve the problem.  There is no explanation, for example, of how other DRMs would interoperate their rights specifications with IDP-1's extended subset of the MPEG REL.  Content owners (as opposed to consumer electronics makers) are increasingly receptive to the idea that consumers should be able to use content on multiple devices.  Yet mappings of rights in one scheme to another are often subjective exercises that ultimately require the content owner's permission.  Ironically, the piece of MPEG-21 that was designed to help address this issue, the Rights Data Dictionary (RDD), is not included in the IDP-1 spec, though we can imagine how practicality considerations for portable devices may have motivated that decision.

The DMP pays considerable attention to the rights of independent content creators to distribute their content under a more expansive set of "governed" conditions -- a more detailed version, in a way, of what the Creative Commons licensing scheme supports.  But there is also no explanation of how this spec helps support consumers' rights to content any more than some existing technologies can -- as opposed to how they are actually used in content services.  (There are points in the documents in which the DMP confuses the two.)  Intense competition, both among copyright-respecting content services and between them and free file-sharing networks, is sometimes resulting in more rights for consumers, not just emulations of pre-digital rights (or what DMP calls TRUs) but also innovative ones. 

The DMP's piece de resistance is its body of TRU descriptions, and we eagerly await the results of its exercise in mapping them to its technology spec.  If they can really accomplish this daunting task, then that will be a unique and highly valuable contribution to the field. 

Finally, as we've said before, the DMP represents a techie's view of digital content and DRM, in that it calls for a comprehensive technology framework to govern content creation, distribution, and usage with managed rights.  Although the DMP understands the market forces correctly from the consumer's perspective, its ideas are not evident of how the economics behind all that technology should play out.  In other words: who is going to pay for all that technology?  Certainly not the leading consumer electronics vendors, which have emerged as the true enemies of interoperability.  And not content owners, who are underrepresented in the DMP's membership, and notwithstanding their growing support of controlled interoperability. 

We continue to like the Coral Consortium's approach to DRM interoperability better, because it is based on the principle that interoperability is best viewed as a service with specific value to the consumer rather than as an ideal.  Consumers don't think of themselves as wanting "interoperability"; they want an adapter for playing music on their iPods through their car stereos (Griffin, US $35), a movie download that they can watch throughout their homes (Linksys, $300), or music downloads that they can play on both iPods and their Windows Media devices ($0.49 or more each, RealNetworks). There is a real difference between these perspectives.  Understanding it should help the DMP to channel its technically impressive efforts towards activities with practical market effect and get the industry to view it as something more than just yet another standards body.

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