The most successful standards initiative in 2004, by far, was the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) with its Download and DRM standards.  The OMA announced OMA DRM 2.0 early in the year, together with a compliance and licensing body called the Content Management Licensing Authority (CMLA), and it published the DRM 2.0 spec during the summer.  Many of the major European wireless carriers announced OMA-compliant content services during the year.  The list of OMA-compliant DRM software vendors ballooned to a far larger size than it should end up in a couple of years -- this actually being a healthy sign of a vibrant early market. Security giant RSA joined in, and pre-OMA mobile DRM vendors such as Lockstream and SDC modified their technologies to conform to the standard.

The biggest winner among the software vendors this year was probably CoreMedia of Germany, which announced a deal with Vodafone for its DRM server software that will result in OMA-compliant services launching in over a dozen countries. Beep Science of Norway was also a winner, partnering with Sony in StreamMan, which is the most advanced mobile music service to date.  OMA has seen no action in the US wireless services market so far. 

All this sets up OMA for a showdown with the other major set of DRM standards, which are part of MPEG-21: the Rights Expression Language (MPEG REL), Rights Data Dictionary (RDD), and Intellectual Property Management Protocol (IPMP).  ISO officially ratified the MPEG REL this past April, and other standards bodies (including Open eBook Forum, TV Anytime, and Content Reference Forum) decided to adapt it to their needs, but there appeared to be no actual production implementations of the language on the market.  Instead, two rights expression languages are in actual use.  One is XrML from ContentGuard, which Microsoft uses in its DRM implementations (Microsoft now owns approximately one-third of ContentGuard); XrML formed the basis for MPEG REL but is not the same language.  The other is the subsets of Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL) that OMA has adopted for its DRM standards. 

MPEG-21 and OMA Download/DRM are different beasts; the former is much broader in scope than the latter.  Thus it could be argued that MPEG-21 is supposed to take longer to have an actual impact on the market.  On the other hand, it is possible that MPEG-21 may have overreached, and like other ISO technology standards (anyone remember the seven-layer network model?), its elegance and good intentions may well be overtaken by events and by the market.  Yet it's too early to draw that conclusion.  If Microsoft decides to move its DRM implementations from XrML to MPEG REL, that will certainly change the market dynamics; apart from that, we find it hard to imagine device makers that will choose to implement to MPEG REL instead of one of the niche-oriented standards in the next couple of years.

A standards initiative that launched this year applies to another emerging niche market for online content services: digital video devices, such as set-top boxes.  The Secure Video Processor (SVP) consortium was announced in October at the IBC conference in Amsterdam by its founding members, Thomson, NDS, and STMicroelectronics -- the latter being a maker of chips for set-top devices.  SVP applies to the world in which conditional access (CA) technology currently reigns supreme; more advanced interactive services are being contemplated that include two-way communication, content encryption, and authentication methods that go beyond smartcards to embrace home-network authentication.  The SVP spec includes Content Segment Licenses (CSLs), its own miniature version of a rights expression language. 

SVP is primarily a hardware standard, and to its credit, the organization has played up the low cost of hardware implementation.  One unfortunate aspect of SVP's positioning in the market, on the other hand, is that it is making claims of applicability beyond the set-top realm, such as to mobile devices.  SVP should stick to set-top boxes, especially in the early going, and leave the mobile devices to OMA.  Engineers' ambitions and good intentions can have negative market effects. 

Other standards initiatives related to home networking began to gain momentum in 2004.  The 4C and 5C consumer electronics consortia have been defining standards related, respectively, to content storage media (Copy Protection for Recordable/Prerecorded Media, or CPRM/CPPM) and the network protocols for inter-device communication (Digital Transmission Content Protection, or DTCP).  Toshiba, one of the members of the 4C Entity, introduced CPRM-compliant DVDs this past year.  These specs are positioned well, because they apply to what everyone agrees are the essential building blocks of home digital entertainment networks, not to home entertainment network "solutions," whatever that means.

In general, we are more likely to bet on the success of standards that apply to niche markets.  Our guiding principle is that it is almost impossible to predict the behavior of early technology markets beyond a few vertical niches; therefore, standards that are broad and purport to apply that far into the future are therefore quite likely either to be too specific and risk inapplicability, or be too general and risk having no one care about them. 

Of course, the downside of the above scenario is a Babel of standards that do not interoperate... which does not help very much, and which engenders the need for interoperability standards.  Thus, the final area of standards in 2004 that we'll cover here relates to DRM interoperability. 

The year saw two widely divergent attempts at interoperability standardization come into being.  The first was Dr. Leonardo Chiariglione's Digital Media Project (DMP), which was officially announced in late 2003.  We continue to be mystified as to how this extremely ambitious initiative is supposed to impact the market.  After having been formally incorporated in early 2004, the DMP held a series of workshops that culminated in a working draft spec of an Interoperable DRM Platform (IDP) in October, in addition to a document that enumerates a long list of Traditional Rights Usages (TRUs) that the platform should be able to represent.  The DMP expects the IDP to be used as a standard framework in the future by device makers, service providers, and so on.

We hold to our original view of the DMP: that it represents a techie's idealized world of automated rights processing on every device that is informed by desiderata of both rights owners and consumers -- without regard to such ticklish questions as what real-world incentives content owners and device makers have to play along, and who will pay for implementations of all this technology.  We would love to be proven wrong, considering the amount of thoughtful work that has gone into the DMP thus far. 

We suspect that the most important lasting legacy of DMP, at least from the work it has generated thus far, is its list of TRUs along with their precise definitions.  This ought to be valuable to consumer advocacy organizations, such as Consumers Union and Center for Democracy and Technology in the US, who take DRM seriously enough to want to evaluate DRM implementations according to their support for consumers' rights to and expectations for content use.

The other standards body addressing itself to DRM interoperability is the Coral Consortium, whose initial members included InterTrust, its owners Sony and Philips, HP, Fox movie studios, Matsushita, and Samsung.  (Newer members include set-top box players NDS and STMicroelectronics, the Dutch DRM server software vendor DMDSecure, and Universal Music).  Coral arose out of research done by InterTrust on an approach to DRM interoperability through a service provider architecture called NEMO (Networked Environment for Media Orchestration).  InterTrust also wrote an interesting white paper that compared various approaches to DRM interoperability, which essentially said that it's not possible to achieve it through standards alone; yet Coral intends to create standards to solve the problem.

We like the Coral/NEMO approach because, for once, it actually lines up with market incentives instead of platitudes.  Where interoperability that does not exist is desired, a market opportunity appears.  One example of this is in the area of text and word processing formats, of which literally hundreds exist. Inso Corp. made a nice business from licensing its suite of conversion filters for these formats (the content management vendor Stellent now owns this business).  In DRM, if (for example) Apple continues to insist on not interoperating its iTunes service or FairPlay DRM with other music services or formats, then there's an opportunity for someone else to provide interoperability. 

A kind of interoperability for iTunes/FairPlay already exists in the form of the several hacks to it that have appeared, such as those of Jon Lech Johansen, the author of the DeCSS hack to DVD encryption.  Another form exists from RealNetworks, whose incentive is to draw users to its RealPlayer Music Store and derive revenue from downloads.  An architecture that allows interoperability service providers to "plug in" to existing or new technologies can create an environment for savvy operators to find the right incentives and make them happen.  If the Coral Consortiumcan figure out how to create a services-based architecture for DRM interoperability through open standards, even though InterTrust doesn't believe this to be the ideal way, then it should get traction.

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