Dr. Leonardo Chiariglione, the founder of MPEG, launched the
Digital Media Project
with the publication of the
Digital Media
Manifesto.
The Digital Media Project is an unaffiliated, geographically
diverse, nonprofit group dedicated to breaking what the Manifesto
calls the stalemate among various players in the digital media value
chain that prevents digital media markets from reaching their
potential. The Manifesto is a broad-reaching document that
outlines a vision and plan for the Digital Media Project's work over
the next few years; DRM is its primary focus.
In a sense, the Manifesto is like a major revision of the white
paper "Letting Loose
the Light quot; written by Dr. Mark Stefik of Xerox PARC in the
mid-1990s. Like that seminal document in DRM history, the
Digital Media Manifesto outlines a technology-centric view of how
digital media markets can develop based around interoperable DRM
standards - one which considers technology-based solutions to
problems of content commerce and rights management as both
conceivable and preferable to solutions based on law. Yet the
Manifesto is far more informed on both the legal and business sides
- the legacies of intellectual property laws, technology
regulations, and content licensing regimes - than its
predecessor.
The Manifesto covers all of the bases, although several of its goals
strike us as idealistic. The Digital Media Project intends to
foster the development of standards that lead to networked digital
media value chains that are entirely controlled by interoperable
technology. The Manifesto doesn't specify exactly how this
will be done; presumably the participants in the Project will carry
its objectives into various standards bodies.
One particular
objective is to do away with the levies on blank media that exist in
many countries. Levies, like statistically-based licensing
regimes (e.g., BMI's for music on radio in the U.S.), are proxies
for the kind of precise compensation schemes for content use that
are theoretically possible when every component in the digital media
value chain is interoperable; so, the rationale goes, if you can
track and compensate every usage, then you don't need levies.
This is a worthy yet wildly ambitious goal, because all of
the dots must be technologically connected before anyone will agree
to give up levies.
Another ambitious objective of the Project is to help develop
standards for interoperable end-user playback devices, an example
being the DVB Common Interface for digital video poadcasting.
The Manifesto makes some economic arguments for why device makers
might be interested in doing this, but it sidesteps what we think is
the most important point: interoperability in end-user devices means
added functionality, which means higher unit cost - which is
anathema to consumer electronics makers. Unit cost avoidance
led, for example, to the development of the CSS copy protection
scheme for DVDs rather than something more effective.
The final idealistic objective of the Digital Media Project that we
would like to mention here is to map legacy IP law and content
licensing regimes, as well as reasonable usage rights expectations,
to rules in the digital world. This, if it's even possible at
all, would seem to require large amounts of heavy-duty technology to
determine which users have the rights to do which things to/with
which media objects on which devices, and then track those uses to
ensure proper compensation. See above about unit cost.
Having said that, this is a fascinating, scintillating, and
inspiring document that ought to be required reading for everyone
concerned with these issues, even if a salt shaker is a recommended
reading accessory. We especially like the Manifesto's
considered and balanced discussion of standards processes, which is
obviously the product of many years' hard-won experience: the
document calls for open standards over de facto standards, while
acknowledging that bureaucracy can slow down open standards
processes too much, and it calls for standards to be able to include
proprietary technologies that can be licensed under RAND (reasonable
and non-discriminatory) terms, while also decrying the overabundance
of questionable patents that have been granted in recent years and
that serve as obstacles to standards progress.
The identities of the Manifesto's authors (other than Dr.
Chiariglione) are not revealed, except that some supporters are
quoted in the
press release that went out. Unfortunately, neither the
major media companies nor the big consumer device makers are
represented there. One of the most important first steps in
the Project's long road to achieving its stated objectives is to get
those all-important players to the table; without them, the Digital
Media Project cannot possibly succeed.
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