e.Digital Corporation (fka EDIG)

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Distribution/protection dilemma
By Albhy Galuten, Senior Vice President, for Advanced Technology, Universal eLabs, Universal Music Group, Santa Monica, Calif., EE Times
Jun 24, 2002 (7:35 AM)
URL: http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20020621S0068
What if there was a free publishing Web site, called, say, Bookster? One could easily take the 10 best-selling books in any given week, cut off the spines, scan the pages into a computer, convert them to text using optical character recognition, hire a few college kids to proofread them and have all 10 on the Internet within 24 hours. This hasn't been a problem for the book industry, because electronic books are not yet as good as their print counterparts, and people don't like reading novels on their PCs. In the next few years, however, we will see flexible, light, pocket-size, backlit viewers that offer better resolution than a printed book. They will be able to easily hold hundreds of books or thousands of magazines and will go for weeks without recharging.

The point of this example is that the problem of unconstrained content copying is not specific to music. It's an electronic media problem. Music, like the canary in the coal mine, is just the first to feel the effects in store for all media.

Some people carry video cameras into the theater, film the movie and then sell DVDs in territories where pirated movies are the norm. Most people don't. We have decided, as a society, that risks associated with this kind of piracy are outweighed by the benefits of things like not being searched when we go to the theater. We will find a balance for music, books and games. The question is: How do we, as technologists, give reasonable protection to the creators of intellectual property while still deploying attractive products that give good value to the consumer?

We have all heard the myth that you can't protect content, that people will be able to hack any security and therefore studios should stop trying to protect their content and find a new business model.

The fact is that security has worked for years. Cable and satellite systems use it all the time to protect pay channels and video-on-demand. Certainly not everyone pays, but most people do. What about DVD video? True, CSS-the technique used to protect DVD movies-has been hacked. That hasn't stopped the selling and renting of movies on DVD from being a good business.

Complex problems
The problems surrounding the electronic distribution of music are very complex, and the technology is still developing.

We like our music to be portable. We listen to it in our cars, in our bedrooms, in our garages, when we are jogging or flying in a plane. This leaves out so-called conditional-access solutions that are typically used in cable and satellite systems. They require a connection. There are new physical formats, like DVD-Audio and Super Audio CD, but the CD serves the public pretty well and it will take time for those higher-resolution formats to replace the CD.

Peer-to-peer services seem to indicate that consumers like to download music. They like convenience and they like depth of choice. They like sharing their favorite songs with their friends. Let's take a look at what would be required of a system that supported all this but still protected the rights of the creators.

First, let's assume we want to protect the intellectual property of the creators. This means that there should be some security applied to the content. This security should allow a reasonable amount of sharing so that we can turn our friends on to music and so that we can try out new music ourselves. However, this security should make it difficult to "share" unreasonably. It would be fine to send a song to a friend who could listen to it once or twice. It should not be able to make numerous copies to sell in the schoolyard or to give away to the anonymous masses.

My music-by which I mean any music I have the right to play whether by purchase or subscription-should be available wherever I listen to music. I should be able to listen in every room in my house. I should be able to listen when I am in my car or anywhere I have a portable device. In an ideal world, I should have access to it in hotel rooms or at parties-any place I can be authenticated.

My music should play on all my new devices. I can't play cassettes in CD players and I can't play CDs in memory-based devices. The new music I purchase, however, should be playable in the new devices I buy. Because of the security requirement above, this can't be accomplished by removing security. This has to be accomplished using interoperable security mechanisms.

So let's address the problems in order. Digital rights management (DRM) is maturing as a security technology. There are a number of systems that work reasonably well in PCs.

In portable devices that are not always or ever connected, it is a bit more complicated. There are two solution paths emerging. The first approach is to migrate DRM to portable devices. As devices get more powerful, they are able to support sophisticated technologies. Those devices need to be connected to a network at least some of the time.

The second approach tries to address a trickier problem: devices that are never connected. The most mature technology in this area is Copy Protection for Pre-Recorded Media from Toshiba, Matsushita, Intel and IBM (see www.4centity.com/tech/cprm/). The feature set is, by necessity, more limited than a connected PC.

Next-generation convenience can be provided in two ways. You can carry the music with you or you can have it available wherever you go. As the size of hard disks continues to grow, the issue becomes more and more one of governance, not one of storage. Some estimates say that all the commercially released music ever recorded will fit on a single $100 hard disk well before the end of the decade.

The question is, how does an intelligent system know what it can or can't play and when? There are two basic approaches. The first is to authenticate the user. In that scenario, I could have access to my music anywhere in the world.

The second is to define a limited number of personal devices that would be capable of rendering "my" content. When I buy a new portable or a new car, I add it to the network. When I sell it or lose it, I remove it from my personal network.

The first ultimately provides for more convenience and is clearly where so-called Web or network services are headed. The second is, in some ways, easier to implement but perhaps not as useful in the long run. For either of these two scenarios we need interoperability. For instance, music could be transferred from a PC to a Sony Memory Stick Walkman using Microsoft's DRM and a proprietary plug-in from Sony.