OMA $1-per DRM ‘too expensive’
p2pnet.net News:- It looks as if some manufacturers are finally getting wise to what amounts to DRM scams.
Several consumer electronics makers are balking at a $1 charge for anti-piracy technology suggested by the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA), they told Reuters.
The OMA comprises more than 300 companies representing mobile operators, device and network suppliers, information technology companies, and content providers.
But strangely, the manufacturers aren’t complaining because water-tight DRM is an impossible concept – if you can see it or hear it, you can copy it.
Mobile phone makers would have to pay $1 to put the OMA’s Digital Rights Management (DRM) 1.0 standard into a mobile phone, while it would cost content owners royalties representing 1% of the consumer selling price of their services.
And that’s too much, say some device makers, according to Reuters, which quotes a senior executive at a, “top five mobile phone maker who declined to be named” as pointing out that last year alone, 684 million mobile phones were sold and, “If handset makers had put anti-piracy protection software in those phones, the $684 million in royalties would have exceeded total digital music sales on the Web last year.
They are reluctant to sound “too harsh,” Reuters goes on, because the irony is that they desperately need the OMA’s anti-piracy technology which is the first open standard that can be used by all electronics goods makers. Other technologies are owned and controlled by individual companies such as Apple for its iTunes Music Store and Microsoft.”
March 1st, 2005 at 3:01 pm
…..and the revenues continue to plummet the longer they try to lock the stuff down… Just make the content (music, movies) easy to get at a fair (read F-A-I-R) price and most of it goes away. Fair is determined by the consumers and NOT the greedy fat ass CEO’s that think the margins they always had will stay the same.
Darwin wins again!!