Cellphone firms pool DRM patents
p2pnet.net News:- ZDNet UK says InterTrust, ContentGuard, Sony, Matsushita Electric Industrial and Philips Electronics have, “grouped together essential anti-piracy patents for a standard set by the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA), an organisation of handset makers and mobile telecom operators,” according to MPEG LA, which has a grip on just about all the essential patents for MPEG-2.
The lock-down means mobile phone makers will have to fork out $1 to put the OMA’s Digital Rights Management (DRM) 1.0 standard into a mobile phone; and, content owners who want to use the OMA DRM will pay royalties representing 1% of the consumer selling price of their service, says the report.
“The pooling should also make clear that everyone who uses OMA’s DRM needs to pay royalties,” says ZDNet. “ContentGuard said in October that OMA had not informed its members properly and that many handset makers thought the anti-piracy standard was free.”
ContentGuard is now more or less owned by Time Warner and Microsoft, who recently teamed up to buy most of Xerox Corp’s interests in the company.
Under their joint ownership, “ContentGuard may have both the incentives and the ability to use its IPR portfolio to put Microsoft’s rivals in the DRM solutions market at a competitive disadvantage,” said the European Commission, which nonetheless halted an antitrust investigation into the company.
“The mobile phone industry is the first market where all players have agreed to use a single DRM standard for control of digital content, in stark contrast with the media services available to Internet users on personal computers,” ZDNet points out, adding:
“These services, such as Apple’s iTunes, Sony’s Connect and Microsoft’s MSN Music Club, all have their own proprietary systems to protect songs, despite the fact that they have been built with much of the same technology.”
However, entertainment industry DRM applications are cracked as soon as they’re developed, acting as little more than challenges to the members of the many and various hacker fraternities.
In the meanwhile, “Agreement has been rapid, taking less than four months,” says Andrew Orlowski in The Register.
“But it’s nevertheless a considerable burden to cost-sensitive manufacturers, which often balk at paying more than a few cents for essential software. Handset vendors only pay around $5 to license the air interface. The costs will indirectly be born by the consumers, who as always in a lock-down regime, end up paying more for less.”
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See:-
anti-piracy patents – DRM alliance fights mobile piracy, ZDNet UK, January 7, 2005
teamed up – New ContentGuard DRM patents, p2pnet, December 29, 2004
more for less – Phone biz agrees on $1 DRM levy, The Register, January 7, 2005
January 8th, 2005 at 7:32 pm
Duh, just don’t use OMA’s DRM.
How dumb must you be to want to add something nobody wants anyway?
At least nobody that counts as customers.
And what’s the purpose in pleasing non-customers?
January 9th, 2005 at 8:57 pm
You dont need drm on cellphones.
Nobody wants to trade their stupid 1X1.5 inch postage stamp sized videos or low bitrate korny ringtones, especially when there are applications which allow you to make your own from your own media files
what protects cellphone media is nobody really gives a crap about keeping or sharing it.