The impetus for the Coral Consortium, evidently, is work that InterTrust has been doing on DRM interoperability.  They have built a testbed system called NEMO (Networked Environment for Media Orchestration) that achieves interoperability among a wide range of devices, formats, networks, and types of services.  The initial list of Coral participants includes members of the "InterTrust axis," including Sony and Philips (InterTrust's owners) and HP (Philips's partner in the digital home entertainment space). 

NEMO is the first substantive public development to come out of InterTrust since Sony and Philips bought it in 2002.  The company published a couple of papers on it in January of this year, including one called "The Long March to Interoperable Digital Rights Management," a thoughtful paper on the general theme of DRM interoperability as well as on NEMO as a set of choices about how to solve interoperability problems. 

The basic assumption behind NEMO is that people should be able to use content on whatever devices they own, as long as it's possible to legitimately obtain the rights to it; protocols, formats, and services should not stand in the way.  The NEMO technology includes what amount to wrappers around existing (or future) DRM technologies that communicate with each other, in the manner of IIOP/CORBA object request brokers, or, in the case of devices that are too simple to do it themselves, with gateways that translate such things as rights specifications, license terms, identities, and trust parameters among devices and services. 

In other words, the idea of NEMO is to provide DRM interoperability through services.  In its research, InterTrust eschews the idea that DRM interoperability can be solved through standards alone.  Yet Coral is a standards initiative.  Coral's stated intent is to bring about technology that can work with existing or future DRM systems, with little or no modification.  This means that the resulting technology should play even with those vendors who don't want to participate.  The standards are apparently meant to foster development of interoperability services for consumers.

An interoperability standard for DRM has many technical hurdles to overcome.  Among them is the task of translating the semantics of license terms from one system/service to another, especially where pre-digital licensing conventions, "fair use," and other forms of consumer expectations have to be taken into account and adjudicated, and of dynamically getting blessings for such translations from all of the players in arbitrary content value chains. Another is the difficulty of establishing comparative measures of trust among arbitrarily different systems.  Although work has been done in both areas (the MPEG Rights Data Dictionary and the Digital Media Project's Traditional Rights Usages for the former, and some of InterTrust's other research in the latter), practical applications are not within sight. InterTrust's aforementioned paper notes these difficulties and others.

In addition to the technical hurdles, there are companies that have disincentives to participate in Coral: the device and DRM technology makers behind the currently leading content services -- namely Apple, Microsoft, and Nokia (the latter being the leading force behind the OMA standards taking off in Europe).  These companies want to contain users in the worlds surrounding their devices: PCs and Windows Media-compliant portable devices (Microsoft's recent effort to open its Windows Media APIs to non-Windows devices notwithstanding), iPods, and OMA-compliant mobile phones. 

We would love to be pleasantly surprised by the combination of an announcement that any of those three companies are joining Coral and evidence that they are working to advance its agenda, not derail it. Once again, Coral's objectives are designed so that its success does not depend on those companies taking part, though at the same time, as InterTrust says in its paper, "A DRM system will not interoperate if it does not want to."

It would be hard to disagree that the problems that Coral is trying to solve are worth solving.  But we also have to put Coral into the context of its market-based alternatives.   Digital media journalists like to state the problem as one of WMA files not being playable on iPods (or vice versa, i.e., MPEG-4 AAC/FairPlay files not being playable on Windows Media devices).  Although that is certainly a reductionist view of the situation, and lots of other interoperability problems are sure to result from the coming explosions of devices and services in the mobile and home-network spaces, history teaches us that market forces will lead to only a handful of different and incompatible systems for any given type of content -- 3 or 4 at most.  When that happens, it should be possible for those same market forces to produce ad-hoc interoperability solutions that work well enough -- as RealNetworks proved recently with its Harmony technology.  Apple's hostile stance toward Harmony is evidence enough that any technology that Coral produces will have to work with Apple products, at best without Apple's blessing. 

Perhaps the best news about Coral is not only that it benefits both content providers and consumers, but also, unlike many other DRM technology scenarios, that we can see where the money may come from to pay for it: it's architected so that network service providers can offer DRM interoperability as a differentiating service.  But the ad hoc solutions, including those that are even more "unofficial" than Harmony, will always lurk in the background.  In that respect, time is not on Coral's side.

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