Digital rights go mobile
By Junko Yoshida
EE Times
Feb 06, 2004
PARIS — Venturing onto a landscape already scarred by failed efforts, a mobile-industry organization last week introduced revised technical specifications and a business and legal framework for a digital-rights management and copy-protection scheme.
Unlike previous DRM solutions, the Open Mobile Alliance's version 2.0 specification is an open standard that OMA said can be applied to a range of devices and services. Systems implementing the scheme could appear by the end of the year.
OMA said that it expects its DRM spec to have broader appeal than proprietary solutions and to be applied to the audio, video and wireless application categories, none of which has a dominant DRM scheme today.
By defining a single DRM for multiple devices, providers and markets, OMA is walking a trail blazed by the Secure Digital Music Initiative but will have to hack back the overgrowth that has closed in since the retreat of SDMI, which remains on official hiatus. OMA hopes to succeed where earlier efforts have failed by untangling the conflicting interests that have stalled DRM's adoption and enabling the more open exchange of digital content.
Although some greeted OMA's approach with skepticism, others said it is offering a legitimate platform to which additional technical layers can be added to support applications beyond wireless. In conjunction with OMA's release of DRM version 2.0 last week, the mobile industry announced a separate entity called the Content Management License Administrator, formed to implement and build a business framework for the OMA spec. Participating in the CMLA announcement last week were Intel, mmO2, Nokia, Panasonic, RealNetworks, Samsung and Warner Bros.
OMA's digital-rights management scheme, combined with CMLA's efforts to enforce compliance and robustness rules for DRM implementations, will let consumers download music or video clips. The user could pay once for certain content and then play the content back on any registered device. The initiative makes the DRM applicable to various device categories: "There is nothing in the spec that ties [it exclusively] to the mobile environment," said Gary Mittelstaedt, business development manager for the corporate technology group at Intel Corp.
Seppo Aaltonen, director of wireless-technology marketing at Nokia Technology, said the version 2.0 DRM scheme can be used by online media service companies, PC software vendors and mobile operators on such gear as cell phones, PDAs, PCs, MP3 players, jukeboxes and Wi-Fi devices.
Handsets' multimedia capabilities and the bandwidth of today's cellular networks are still so limited as to make the mobile industry an unlikely candidate for breaking the digital-media logjam. But the industry's motivation is clear.
Nokia, for example, doesn't want its handsets stuck with a proprietary DRM tied to a specific service, which is the business model common to many MP3 players today.
Juha-Pekka Sipponen, the director of media player applications at Nokia Mobile, said the mobile-industry culture historically has promoted open standards. But while industry standards exist for music compression, video compression and file formats, "DRM has been a missing link," Sipponen said.
Unlike previous industry efforts, the mobile industry's DRM initiative separates the development of the DRM spec (OMA's task) from the construction of the business and legal framework (CMLA's domain). Intel's Mittelstaedt said CMLA is responsible for providing compliance and robustness rules for the implementation of an open DRM standard. With CMLA certification of OMA DRM-enabled devices, content and rights holders can rest assured that devices are adequately implemented before releasing premium content.
The CMLA will also manage and distribute keys, thus offering a secure and renewable system for devices, services and content rights in the market.
Further, CMLA will create legal agreements that will "stipulate obligations" for device manufacturers, service providers and content providers, said Mittelstaedt. That will eliminate the need to draft "costly multilateral legal agreements" from the ground up, he said.
According to Mittelstaedt, both OMA and CMLA are advancing their work rapidly. CMLA intends to release standard legal agreements for various industries in the second quarter; the key-delivery mechanism is expected to be operational by year's end. If that timetable sticks, vendors should be able to launch compliant devices by Christmas.
Content owners and device manufacturers have said in the past that they have been loath to release digital content not because of a lack of security technologies, but because of the absence of a viable business model or legal framework to enforce copy-protection schemes. Given the model that combines OMA's version 2.0 spec with CMLA's efforts, "we can now focus on delivering valuable content to users, rather than fighting battles over technology layers," Nokia's Aaltonen said.
He said the version 2.0 spec features several evolutionary improvements over OMA's version 1.0, released in November 2002, including "stronger encryption for future mobile business, support for users to register multiple devices and a DRM that works in cross-domains, including the mobile environment and fixed Internet connection on a PC."
The revised spec contains a client component to provide a piracy-control mechanism via the mobile network or via local connections. Basic features include "forward lock," a simple mechanism that prevents content from leaving the phone, and "combined delivery," which adds further usage rights or restrictions to the content — allowing consumers to use it only once or only for a week, for example. The spec also allows "separate delivery," under which content is delivered as encrypted files, separately from the usage rights. That could allow a superdistribution model in which DRM-protected content could be sent from phone to phone. The receiver of the content could then acquire a "license" to preview or buy the content. Not everybody is convinced that the mobile industry can succeed in breaking the digital-media impasse.
Michael Paxton, senior industry analyst at In-Stat/ MDR, described OMA's DRM scheme as "an extremely small piece that is targeted at a market that really is still under development." Pointing out that "the real challenges and controversies for DRM revolve around the music and motion-picture industries, not the wireless-handset industry," Paxton said, "I guess you can call that either great foresight or astute sidestepping."
OMA's and CMLA's "biggest challenge will still be signing deals with the content owners about compensation for access to their proprietary content," Paxton said. "It's nice to see the tech industry forming these groups that are focusing on DRM issues, but what does the content development community — Disney, Viacom, etc. — really think about OMA? Unknown."
In contrast, Richard Doherty, director of The Envisioneering Group research and consulting firm, called the mobile industry's DRM efforts "much more focused than SDMI.
"It's open," Doherty said. "It's multivendor DRM. It's hard to beat."
Not even OMA promoters are claiming a one-size-fits-all scenario for DRM. "There is nothing exclusive about this," said Intel's Mittelstaedt. "Other potential applications may need another DRM." 'Clear, standard-based model'
Only in time will the success of the mobile industry's crusade be known, but Mittelstaedt asserted that the industry is "making efforts to create one clear, standard- based DRM model that can be substantially useful to a broad set of application needs."
Although applications such as video time shifting for DVD recorders and hard drives may not initially fall within the scope of OMA's DRM initiative, consultant Doherty said that "conditional and time-sensitive DRMs will nicely layer with this effort." He called the OMA's DRM spec a "follow me" effort: Although applicable to handheld devices, "it would also apply to room-to-room and to watching content halfway around the world from my own server or others' servers," he said.
Some observers suggested that by moving fast to develop an open solution, the mobile industry dodged a scenario under which "Microsoft could jam the Windows Media DRM down their throats," as Paxton of In-Stat/MDR put it. Microsoft is an OMA member but is not a part of CMLA.
