By Azita Arvani
From http://www.drmwatch.com
CTIA (Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association) held its Spring show this week in Orlando, Florida, with over 40,000 attendees. At a mobile music panel, speakers emphasized the role of superdistribution which would turn a consumer into a retailer. Warner Music Group's Michael Nash, SVP of Digital strategy and business development, said without DRM, there is no prospect for superdistribution. The author spoke at a session on distributing mobile content and the role of DRM within that. Overall, DRM activities covered a broad spectrum. we have divided them into four categories: practical, visionary, bizarre, and emerging.
MPEG-LA's failure to provide a licensing pool for OMA DRM has forced vendors to seek out bilateral agreements on their own. LG made its first move down that path a few weeks ago when it licensed ContentGuard’s DRM patent portfolio. At CTIA, Intertrust announced that LG will license its patents for use in its mobile voice and data products. The agreement will cover Intertrust's intellectual property that would be included in various DRM and secure computing technologies on LG devices. This agreement is for the client side of DRM solutions, and mobile service providers need to obtain separate service provider's license from Intertrust. WiderThan, a new subsidiary of RealNetworks, announced launch of its music on demand service for Rogers Wireless of Canada that will provide a pay-for-download and a subscription service for both mobile phones and PCs. WiderThan has partnered with SDC for the DRM technology and mobile players on Java and Symbian platforms.
The Marlin Developer Community announced a technology specification called OMArlin that will bridge the gap between OMA DRM v2 and Marlin DRM standards. The idea is to harmonize the content consumption and transfer across home environments and mobile phone environments. OMArlin-compliant devices will allow consumers to have a unified user experience when using content services. The OMArlin specification, which will be released shortly, was originally developed by Intertrust, Philips, and CoreMedia with input from Orange, Vodafone, Panasonic, Samsung and Sony. We applaud the effort to drive interoperability across the DRM's and we like that involvement of carriers in the development of the specification. However, no carrier has formally signed up for the specification.
Shortly before the show got started, Sony gave us a jolt by announcing a proprietary encryption scheme, called CLEFIA (based on the word "clef," which is French for "key"), which can be used with smart cards, portable electronic and mobile devices. Of course, we need another proprietary encryption scheme like a hole in our heads -- and Sony has just the right track record to deliver a new DRM (wink, wink). The company claims the CLEFIA block cipher algorithm delivers "advanced copyright protection and authentication", and is "able to provide advanced capabilities, even in restrictive environments such as smart cards and mobile devices." Sony plans to establish and environment where CLEFIA can be used across various applications and products. We said this was the bizarre category, so we'll leave it at that.
Emerging "place-shifting" technologies are giving users access to media stored on their PC and in process, turning DRM paradigms on their head. Place-shifting encompasses such products as SlingMedia's SlingBox and Sony's LocationFree. The CMWare, a startup based near Princeton, NJ, announced a new technology called myMobileMedia that provides remote control and access to media and applications stored on the PC including music files, pictures and even DRM-protected content. CMWare claims it has the ability to access DRM-protected content from the PC via mobile phones without violating DRM restrictions. According to the company, DRM-protected files are streamed to the mobile device but not locally stored -- similarly to the way a wireless PC speaker works. This may be stretching it a bit: depending on the use cases, some carriers and content providers might consider place-shifted streaming a subscription service, and hence a source of lost revenue. WiMAX was hot at this year's show and so was mobile TV. So it was just natural for someone to marry the two even if it was for a demo. Israel-based Alvarion showcased a Mobile WiMAX TV demo in collaboration with NDS and MobiTV. NDS provided DRM and conditional access solution for the demo. All in all, existing and new mobile content services conjure up various use cases and new implications on DRM. We'll keep you posted on the developments.