Content Protection Standards

Content protection standards achieved either no or modest progress.  OMA DRM 2.0, the advanced version of the Open Mobile Alliance DRM standard, has come to a standstill as fragmentation in the mobile content market and uncertainty about patent licensing royalties both persist.  On the other hand, momentum around OMA DRM 1.0, the simple original standard intended for "lightweight" content and cheaper devices, continues to build.  The OMA DRM 1.0 installed base now exceeds half a billion devices worldwide, and services that implement the standard have gone beyond small intra-national services to ambitious global ones like Omnifone MusicStation.

The Marlin DRM standard for connected portable media players, meanwhile, garnered its first implementation in the United States, through a Pioneer Electronics spinoff called SyncTV, after trials with IPTV devices in Japan.  Sony has decided to standardize on Marlin for its next generation of digital video products, which are to be introduced early in the coming year. 

The AACS standard for "managed copying" of high-def optical discs (HD DVD and Blu-ray) has run into repeated trouble with hacks, such as from Slysoft, a company based on the Caribbean island of Antigua (and thus out of the reach of the DMCA or other anticircumvention laws).  AACS is more robust than the CSS scheme for DVDs; it is not possible to hack the system simply by recovering a single set of keys, and it has the ability to retire keys and force upgrades to compromised software implementations.  Those features haven't worked entirely smoothly, leading to compatibility problems for users as well as security holes. 

The Blu-ray format uses an additional set of security technology known as BD+, which was developed by Cryptographic Research Inc. and is now owned by Macrovision.  So far BD+ appears safe -- although Slysoft claims to be almost ready to release a hack to it.  But this may be one reason why momentum in Hollywood is shifting away from HD DVD and towards Blu-ray as a way of ending the stalemate between those two formats, neither of which garnered much sales during the holiday season.

DRM Interoperability

The Coral Consortium released its first official complete spec in October, but momentum behind it appears to have stalled.  There are several reasons for this. One is the music industry's movement away from DRM for paid permanent downloads, which obviates much of the need for interoperability technology for that type of media.

Another reason is the lack of interest in Coral from service providers (online retailers and ISPs), which are supposed to be the primary "customers" for Coral and to have the economic incentives to build Coral-compliant services.  Service providers have been put off by the cost and complexity of building the necessary technology infrastructure, as well as by the requirement that users' rights be transferrable among service providers (much as SIM cards are transferrable among wireless carriers in many countries).

One piece of evidence of the lack of momentum around Coral is the appearance of the so-called Open Market initiative.  Open Market -- not to be confused with the e-commerce software company of the same name -- is the brainchild of executives at Sony Pictures, a key participant in Coral.  The intent of Open Market is to enable service providers to make content available in multiple formats (and multiple DRMs) for whatever devices users may have in their home or personal networks.  It entails some of the concepts in Coral (and Marlin), such as registration and authentication of a user's devices, but it eschews the DRM interoperability part per se.  Open Market is in very early stages, and even its founders do not expect it to have much impact for another three years, but if it catches on, it may well essentially be the successor to Coral. 

The Digital Media Project, meanwhile, represents an entirely different and independent approach to interoperable DRM.  DMP is the brainchild of Leonardo Chiariglione, the founder of MPEG and former director of the ill-fated SDMI music industry DRM standards project several years ago.

Instead of attempting to interoperate among existing DRMs, which has been Coral's goal, the idea of DMP's Interoperable DRM Platform (IDP) is to build an entirely new ecosystem around a compact set of core DRM capabilities with extensions in functionality for certain types of devices or services.  The DMP initiative released its third spec of IDP and a software reference implementation called Chillout during this past year.  Chillout is available under the Mozilla open source license, thus avoiding problems with DRM software under the latest version of the GNU GPL. 

DMP has no support among major the major media companies that have to bless any content protection technology in order to induce consumer device makers to implement it.  Its membership includes only one top-tier CE vendor (Matsushita) and two smaller ones (JVC and Mitsubishi), along with academic institutions, think tanks, and patent licensing entities.  A nonprofit organization in Italy called Digital Media in Italia (dmin.it) is building an ecosystem around DMP.  In other words, DMP has begun to take on a life of its own, in what looks like a parallel universe to the one that Big Media and Big Consumer Electronics inhabit. 

A highly analogous situation in digital radio broadcasting standards hints at where DMP is likely to go.  One of the existing standards, HD Radio, is essentially an accommodation between big broadcasting companies and the consumer electronics industry.  The for-profit company iBiquity (a Lucent spinoff) owns and licenses HD Radio technology.  It is supported by over a thousand commercial radio stations in the US and by many major CE vendors and retailers.  HD Radio is thus analogous to big commercial DRM schemes like Windows Media DRM and AACS.

Then there is another standard for digital radio, an open one that is finding growing support among nonprofit and government broadcasters -- the type that normally broadcast on shortwave AM -- primarily in Europe but also elsewhere.  A few small unknown vendors offer receivers, mainly as PC software plus devices that plug into PCs via USB.  This standard seems to be modestly thriving in its parallel world.  And now, the punch line: the name of this noncommercial digital radio standard is Digital Radio Mondiale, or DRM. 

We suspect that the DMP will follow a similar trajectory to that "other" DRM.  It may even find some impact in the world of user-generated content (UGC). 

Unauthorized commercial uses of UGC (such as photos on Flickr) are on the rise, along with litigation over such uses.  This is an area that is crying out for solutions to the problem of getting content creators paid while avoiding what the UGC community views as the taint around big-media DRM.  The fact that some content creators want to be paid for their work tends to be sadly overlooked amid all the hoopla over user-generated content.

Rights Licensing Information

Another of the most interesting digital rights standards developments of 2007 also came from the UGC world: CC+ from Creative Commons.  We have said several times that if you strip away the shroud of political correctness around Creative Commons, you find a rights management framework -- once that not only makes sense but is a very worthy attempt to make copyright law accessible to people who aren't (or can't hire) copyright lawyers.  Creative Commons is a small set of content license attributes that cover such things as "allow reproduction but require attribution" or "allow excerpts of this work to be used in other works" -- or, as the organization itself puts it, "some rights reserved." 

During the last year or so, the inevitable happened: entrepreneurs started to figure out that Creative Commons can be used as the basis for rights licensing services, particularly for user-generated content such as blog posts and photos.  One of those entrepreneurs was John Palfrey, director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, one of the organizations that started Creative Commons five years ago.  His startup company, Lisensia (now RightsAgent), was the first of several to see this opportunity. 

Finally -- and after what we imagine was a lot of heated philosophical argument -- Creative Commons released a new license attribute called CC+, which provides for commercial licensing as an extension to existing Creative Commons licenses.  One of the companies that helped launch this last month was CCC (Copyright Clearance Center), the US publishing industry's text rights licensing entity. 

It is as yet unclear how CC+ might affect the commercial publishing industry, but we expect CC+ to have a major impact as UGC sites start supporting it.  We fully expect the advent of CC+ to engender a commercial software and service industry around Creative Commons, much as has happened around Linux.  And despite Creative Commons' strong anti-DRM stance, it is worth repeating that CC+, like the rest of Creative Commons, is not mutually exclusive with DRM.  In fact, one of the several "CC+ startups," Cloakx, has actually bridged the gap: it is a DRM technology company (despite its own protests to the contrary) that supports CC+ licensing. 

The two other standards that made the most progress during 2007 were also related to rights licensing information.  ACAP (Automated Content Access Protocol) received a lot of momentum thanks to support by a broad swath of the news publishing industry.  It is an attempt to bring about what Mark Stefik of PARC has called "trusted search engines," which will index published content only under terms that the publishers specify, which could include expiration dates, rules for only displaying snippets in search results, and so on. 

Publishers claim that ACAP will succeed because it solves what we have called the Discoverability Paradox -- the fact that much professionally selected, edited, and produced content is not available for online search and discovery because publishers are reluctant to release it for fear of misuse.  This is a problem that badly needs to be solved, and ACAP is a particularly smart attempt to solve it: it is not overly complex, and it builds on existing technology (Robots Exclusion Protocol, or REP) rather than requiring search engines to build complex systems from scratch.

Unfortunately, the three main search engine operators -- Google, MSN, and Yahoo -- show no signs of implementing ACAP so far.  That's no surprise, because there is currently little economic incentive for them to do so.  Search engines make money primarily by selling ads associated with all web content in search results.  The volume of content that would become newly indexable if they all implemented ACAP is a tiny fraction of what they already index -- meaning hardly any incremental revenue -- and they view ACAP implementation as ceding control to publishers. 

Therefore we suspect that implementation of ACAP will, at least initially, be confined to startup search engines seeking to distinguish themselves based on their ability to find "premium content" -- startups like the French Exalead, the only search company participating in the ACAP pilot program.  Only if such startups start eating significantly into the market share of the big three will there be much incentive for them to come onboard.  And even search startups pose a Catch-22: although the ACAP pilot project was deemed successful, publishers may not want to bother producing ACAP-tagged web content to scale if it's only for the benefit of a few small search engines with minimal user bases.

The alternative to ACAP for the publishing industry and the big three search engines is the undesirable status quo, which includes not only the Discoverability Paradox but also lots of long, drawn-out, expensive, and risky litigation.  It is also conceivable that a judge may enjoin a search engine to implement ACAP as part of a litigation settlement, but such outcome is highly unpredictable.

The final noteworthy rights licensing standard comes from the world of digital images: PLUS (Picture Licensing Universal Standard).  This is an ad-hoc standards initiative, led by photographer Jeff Sedlik, whose primary participants include online stock photo agencies such as Corbis, Getty Images, and Jupiterimages (corporate sibling of JupiterOnlineMedia, publisher of DRM Watch).  Adobe is also a key participant.

There has been a long-felt need for rights management of commercially available digital images.  Using encryption-based DRM schemes is highly impractical, given that such images' users -- graphic artists at publishers, ad agencies, and so on -- typically manipulate them within layouts in Photoshop, QuarkXPress, or InDesign.  But being able to express image licensing terms in a standard machine-readable form can create many efficiencies by enabling image users to incorporate such information into their own rights information databases and by eliminating a lot of tedious manual processing. 

PLUS released its first full spec in October.  It is essentially a set of metadata for image files, expressed in the Adobe XMP standard that many image processing applications (not just Adobe's) and digital asset management systems support.  It contains codes for various types of "media usages" for images that cover the needs of many different types of photographers (nature, food, sports,  fashion, news, etc.). 

PLUS will help the online stock photo industry become more efficient, and it should help induce publishers and ad agencies to build rights information repositories that make them more efficient as well.  In short, it seems like a no-brainer.  The next step for PLUS ought to be to firm up its stance through affiliation with an established standards body, such as IDEAlliance.

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