Consumer electronics giants agree on digital rights management

By Steve Malone

Posted on 20 Jan 2005 at 15:22

The world's four giants in consumer electronics have agreed to adopt a common method of digital rights management (DRM). The deal opens the way for copy protected music and video to play across devices from any manufacturer.

The companies - Sony, Matsushita (Panasonic), Samsung and Philips - have formed the Marlin Joint Development Association (Marlin JDA) in order to establish a common standard for playing 'appropriately licensed video and music on any device'.

While the sale of MP3 players have boomed over the past few years, the partners feel the growth has been restricted by a lack of an established standard for protecting copyright. As a result most music players either have no DRM protection at all or have a proprietary method as with Sony and Apple devices. The impasse has also meant that copyright protection issues have prevented the market for portable DVD players from taking off at all.

Microsoft's attempt to establish a standard with Window Media Player has been greeted with suspicion by the consumer electronics business - a point made by the inclusion of Intertrust Technologies in the Marlin Group

Last year Intertrust and Microsoft settled a patent lawsuit with Microsoft receiving a license to Intertrust's patent portfolio for a one-off payment of $440 million.

The group expects that the specifications established by the Marlin JDA will allow consumer electronics companies to use a single technology toolkit to build DRM capability into their devices. A common standard will not only allow manufacturers to exploit the potential to download movies to hard disks legally, but lead to cheaper prices from commodity architecture as well as assuage the doubts of the big movie studios, including, of course, Sony.

The group says that the Marlin JDA specifications will be fully compatible with the Coral initiative, which is also aimed at developing a set of DRM service protocols for interoperability between copy protection systems.

The Marlin JDA will also offer a Licensing and Compliance Program and a Community Source Program to allow companies to obtain sample code modules and licenses for the specifications. The Marlin JDA plans to release version 1.0 of its specifications this summer.