The Marlin JDA is closely related to another consortium, Coral, which was announced last October and whose membership includes all of the members of Marlin. The Coral Consortium's specs for services-based DRM interoperability will provide input to Marlin, and each of the members of Marlin will contribute technology to what will be a "community source" project a la Sun Microsystems's Java.

InterTrust is contributing two primary technologies to Marlin. One is NEMO (Networked Environment for Media Orchestration), a reference DRM interoperability services technology that has formed the basis for Coral. The other is a more recent technology called Octopus.  Octopus is a DRM technology toolkit that is designed to facilitate rapid DRM deployments on a wide variety of devices; it consists of components for designing, deploying, and interpreting "rights objects," which include rights metadata and subscription tokens.  InterTrust expects to make more information about Octopus public in a few months.

Answering this requires solving two problems. One is the problem of establishing an identity scheme that spans multiple devices as well as multiple content services. Universal digital identity schemes are attractive ideas, but they require technology infrastructure that is significant (especially for small, low-cost consumer devices), and they tend to spook privacy advocates who fear a "Big Brother" database of user information. As we noted recently, the Liberty Alliance has emerged as the best potential solution to these problems; it defines a "federated" identity infrastructure that eschews the idea of one entity owning the entire database. Marlin intends to use Liberty Alliance principles in its code, if not the actual Liberty spec itself.

The other problem that the Marlin JDA must solve is that of what it means to own a device. What if a device is shared, lent, given away, or sold on eBay?  What if it's a "family" device, such as the set-top box atop the living room television?  There are no precise ways to answer this.  At a minimum, users will have to register their devices, when they purchase them, with an ID registry that can federate identities with other such registries, and there will need to be services that provide secure ways of transferring ownership identities when devices are sold or given away. 

Technology will always impose limits on how accurately device ownership can be tracked, including ambiguities about ownership that technology cannot decide. In those cases (and all others), the ultimate arbiters of decisions about who gets to view or play what content are the content owners.  It's one thing to offer technology for content interoperability; it's another matter entirely to get content owners to agree to license their content for use in these networks -- which can expand almost indefinitely with the additions of new devices and services. 

Apple's iTunes provides a counterexample: content owners can be confident that users will only be able to play music they buy on iTunes on Macs and iPods (and burn them to CDs, under certain limitations).  Microsoft's Windows Media DRM for Portable Devices sits somewhere in the middle, providing interoperability with devices as long as the user's PC serves as the main point of control. 

And of course, the Marlin JDA initiative is a competitive reaction to what Microsoft is doing with content portability, as much as it is an opportunistic response to consumers' concerns that content they purchase is not playable on arbitrary devices.  Marlin is an attempt to do for portable consumer devices what the Open Mobile Alliance is doing specifically for mobile phones: develop a multi-vendor interoperable standard that will compete with Microsoft and either force it to interoperate or shut it out. 

The timetable of Marlin calls for specifications to appear in the coming months, and for the formation of a licensing authority (similar to CMLA) that will enforce standards compliance and administer patent licensing.  It also calls for devices that incorporate the technology to come on the market next year.  By that time, OMA-compliant devices and services as well as those based on the Microsoft technology will be prevalent.  Whether this meta-competition ends up helping or confusing both content owners and consumers remains to be seen.

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