The "media player" axis of consumer electronics companies -- which includes Panasonic, Philips, Samsung, Sony, and others -- was most active in developing new standards.  The two that they are backing are Marlin and Coral, and they are complementary.  Marlin is a spec for a DRM technology intended for use with connected portable devices.  It is based on some very elegant R&D done by Intertrust -- the DRM technology company jointly owned by Sony and Philips -- that uses graph theory instead of rights expression languages to determine what rights a particular combination of user and device has to a given body of content.  The first complete Marlin spec issued in May, and a trial in Japan (part of an IPTV trial) will take place early this coming year. 

DRM Interoperability Standards

Coral is a DRM interoperability standard based on the same underlying messaging technology as Marlin, a technology also developed by Intertrust and known as NEMO. Coral is a practical approach to DRM interoperability; it is meant to be used by service providers that have an incentive to offer it, such as customer lock-in or cross-sell.  The first public Coral spec was published in June, and shortly thereafter, the Coral working group published a white paper showing how Microsoft Windows Media DRM can interoperate with Coral "out of the box," i.e., with no changes to the technology.  This is an important result; the Coral group has already shown interoperability with both Marlin and OMA DRM. 

The major obstacle to Coral's market uptake is the lack of cooperation from Apple -- which, of course, does not make its iTunes and FairPlay technology available (or even visible through published APIs) to anyone else.  It is possible that Jon Lech Johansen's DoubleTwist technology will solve this problem; see our year-end DRM technology review for more on this.  Still, a lot of interest is building in Coral: its membership now totals 35 organizations, including all four major music companies, three major movie studios, the RIAA, IFPI, NARM, IFPI, and many consumer electronics companies in addition to several DRM-related technology vendors. 

Besides Apple, the other missing piece in Coral is the participation of service providers that could build Coral-compliant services.  The current membership only lists two major ones: AOL and Time Warner Cable, both subsidiaries of the media giant Time Warner.  No other ISPs, telcos, or cable companies are involved. This does not bode particularly well for Coral as it moves into 2007 -- a year in which it needs to find uptake among service providers, lest it lose its considerable momentum. 

The two other DRM interoperability standards initiatives that had activity in 2006 were the Digital Media Project (DMP) and Sun Microsystems's Project DReaM.  DMP released its second major spec, IDP-2, back in May. IDP-2 finally showed DMP's approach to interoperability, something that was inexplicably missing from the first spec (IDP-1) the previous year.  The IDP-2 approach is the converse of Coral.  Instead of providing interoperability among existing DRM technologies, as Coral does, IDP-2 is a spec for a new, device-centric DRM that includes a small amount of required core functionality and enables particular devices to include extended DRM features.  The idea is that everyone should adopt IDP-2 and choose the set of DRM features that makes the most sense for any particular device.

The IDP-2 spec is an elegant piece of work, but DMP continues to suffer from the same problems as before: an idealistic bent and a membership list that includes no major content providers and only a couple of major consumer electronics vendors.  On reflection, we find that the IDP-2 technology is conceptually similar to the Octopus DRM toolkit technology from Intertrust that forms the basis (along with NEMO, as mentioned above) for Marlin.  This is somewhat ironic, given that Marlin is positioned as a single DRM solution, not an interoperability standard. 

Sun's Project DReaM (DRM/everywhere available) originally had the Quixotic goal of being a spec for interoperable DRM that would both be developed on a community-source basis and avoid reading on the existing DRM intellectual property.  Recent activity on Project DReaM shows a much more modest goal: an open-source, royalty-free conditional access technology for IPTV systems called DReaM/CAS.  The other spec being developed by the DReaM group, a more ambitious technology called DReaM/MMI (for "Mother May I"), did not -- unsurprisingly -- get a clean bill of health in a patent coverage review (by an unnamed legal authority) commissioned by Sun. 

The DReaM/CAS spec may well be of interest in the nascent market for IPTV security, which is fragmented among several small vendors, as we mention in our year-end technology review.  At a minimum, the availability of an open-source solution could reduce prices of the proprietary technologies; if the technology is successful, those vendors could even morph into providers of value-added implementations of DReaM/CAS.  For this to happen, video content providers must approve the technology, which has not happened yet.

Mobile DRM Standards

2006 saw two standards-related points of movement in mobile DRM.  It has now been over a year since the first OMA DRM 2.0-based content service launched; no others have followed suit. The word of mouth around OMA DRM 2.0 among handset makers and wireless carriers is now so negative that we believe only a miracle can save it from oblivion.  That miracle may come from the DVB-H (Digital Video Broadcasting for Handhelds) community in Europe, which is gearing up to launch a number of services into production next year, but it is more than equally possible that DVB-H will become a vehicle for conditional access technology from vendors like NDS, Nagravision, Thomson, and Irdeto. 

At the same time, OMA DRM 1.0 continues to proliferate; estimates put the global installed base of devices that are OMA DRM 1.0 compliant -- or can be via over-the-air software downloads -- at as much as half a billion.  Yet questions over "patent overhang" -- the applicability of DRM-related patents from companies like ContentGuard and Intertrust to OMA DRM 1.0 implementations -- remain unresolved, as do concerns about implementation complexity.  The patent pool for OMA DRM 1.0 implementations put together by the patent licensing organization MPEG LA last year appears to be dead, as no progress in negotiations with the wireless industry on licensing terms has been made in over a year and a half, and MPEG LA has been focusing on Blu-ray and other fronts. 

The other mobile DRM standards activity came from Melodeo, a Seattle-based provider of proprietary mobile content delivery infrastructure whose customers have included Telefónica Móviles de España and Rogers Wireless of Canada.  As we mentioned in our year-end review of DRM-enabled content services, Melodeo is now focusing on MobilCast, its mobile podcasting service.  Back in June, Melodeo made its mobile DRM technology available to third parties under the name PachyDRM, positioning it as an open standard.  In reality, the PachyDRM spec is available on an open-standard basis, but the source code carries a licensing fee of US $0.05 per device -- admittedly much cheaper than, say, Windows Media DRM for Portable Devices -- and no indemnification for any patents on which it may read.  To our knowledge, PachyDRM has had no takers thus far.

AACS

The major new standard of interest to the film industry is Advanced Access Content System (AACS), which is backed by IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Panasonic (Matsushita), Sony, Toshiba, Disney, and Warner Bros.  AACS is a grab-bag of content protection technologies that has been adopted by both of the factions in the high-definition optical disc format wars, HD DVD (backed by Toshiba) and Blu-ray (backed by Disney and Sony).  AACS appeared to be a major success in that it eschewed the essential problems of DeCSS security for DVDs: it is a much stronger, flexible, and more comprehensive DRM scheme, and the consumer electronics industry agreed to adopt it apparently without any subsidies. 

Yet AACS already seems a bit frayed around the edges.  CE vendors have devices supporting both formats on the market, and although sales were slow this year, they are expected to grow significantly in 2007 as consumers bought HD TV sets in droves this holiday season (ours is a Sony Bravia!) and will presumably want sources of worthy content for them in the coming year.  The problem is that the spec is not finalized; even so, device makers have been selling players that do not implement a few of the features, such as digital output resolution control.  The lesson here for film studios is that they can succeed in demanding a host of content protection features to be built into consumer electronics before they will agree to license their content for use in those devices, but those features must be chosen rationally according to implementation practicality. 

Creative Commons

Our final note on standards concerns the open rights management standard that could turn out to be the one true success story of the decade: Creative Commons (CC).  Although CC is a product of the so-called "copy left" academic axis and has been associated with many diatribes against the media industry and DRM, it is really a standard for expressing certain types of rights that a content publisher wishes to grant others.  Some of the terms in CC licenses can be enforced proactively through technology.

No less an organization than Microsoft has seen CC's potential and acted on it.  In June, Microsoft issued a free add-on to Microsoft Office applications that lets users insert CC licenses into their Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents with simple menu selections. 

Then more recently, a startup called Lisensa announced a service that will license RSS feeds of blog content using a combination of CC and commercial licensing terms.  The person behind Lisensa is associated with the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School, a bastion of the copy left.  Creative Commons has attributes in common with OMA DRM 1.0 that may well lead to its success as a rights management standard: it is simple (not over-engineered) and it applies to a very interesting emerging market (consumer created content).  As we head into 2007, we expect more stories like Lisensa to appear that enhance CC's appeal in the real world of digital content rights and commerce.

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