The Other Shoe Drops
ne of my 2005 predictions, hardly a stretch perhaps and yet beyond my typical zone of expertise, is that open source will flourish as a mainstream practice. So you can imagine how exciting it was that the details of the Intertrust Coral DRM scheme are to be made open source, allowing every vendor to customize it to their own product while maintaining total interoperability. Intertrust is a DRM development organization bought by Philips and Sony in 2002, and is therefore likely to form the basis of the BD DVD DRM. Are you still with me?
If you have been following the development of the next generation blue laser videodisc formats HD DVD and Blu-Ray of BD DVD you know about the HD DVD group favoring an extension of the existing DVD technology in the form of a disc that will hold three times the amount of data and that they have been working on a copy protection scheme called AACS. You know the BD DVD group has a proposal that requires new manufacturing equipment but offers five times the current capacity, and details of the DRM scheme it would propose to movie studios completely preoccupied with copy protection was sketchy until now.
Peter White of the London consultancy Rethink writes in The Register this week that there is a connection as well as a competition between the two DRM approaches.
The open source initiative is being called the Marlin Joint Development Association, and is created by Intertrust, Philips, and Sony with the backing of Samsung, Matsushita, Hewlett-Packard, and the News Corporation to provide specifications to develop Coral-compliant DRM systems. Coral, announced last October, is based on InterTrusts’s NEMO (Networked Environment for Media Orchestration) architecture and, at least in principle, will work with existing DRM systems including Apple’s Fairplay, Sony’s MagicGate, and Microsoft’s Media DRM providing they open their systems, too. In response to the balkanization of content created by the lack of interoperability between DRM technologies, Coral allows them to be separate but compatible.
The Content Reference Forum was put together a year ago, led by Microsoft and ContentGuard, to promote Windows Media DRM for devices including DVD players, recorders, DVRs, and home media servers, and the initiative to make Coral open source is in opposition with Microsoft’s interests to dominate CE as it has PC technology. Apparently the patents for the Microsoft Video Codec VC-1 and its DRM belong, asserts White, to “Microsoft plus 11 other organizations who have claimed essential patents in the MPEG LA licensing process for Microsoft’s VC-1″. In addition, Microsoft just paid Intertrust “$440 million to license the entire patent portfolio for DRM patents at Intertrust”, according to White. This was just short of the original purchase price of Intertust.
This puts the not only the HD DVD group but Microsoft as well in opposition not only to Blu-Ray but to open source DRM. Are you still with me? Hang in there for the punch line, ok?
Microsoft, Time Warner and Thomson bought the ContentGuard technology from Xerox. Not surprisingly, Microsoft’s position is that DRM should be based on their proprietary language, called XrML, r for rights. The European Commission has objected pending an investigation into the unfair competitive advantage the takeover potentially represents for Microsoft to extend its monopoly in operating systems, which the Commission has actively opposed to a far greater degree than the US FTC, to Microsoft’s holding the electronic keys to databases, software programs, movies, music, and games given historic patterns of market behavior previously ruled as predatory by the European Commission.
More and more pointers are being drpped to suggest the next generation of high definition blue laser videodiscs will not be out until 2006, as the timetable for release of the initial Marlin specification is after mid-year 2005 with devices incorporating it coming on the market early in 2006. Among these devices is sure to be BD DVD, the Philips-Sony-Pioneer et al blue laser recorder. This explains why Thomson may have been convinced to lend their name to the HD DVD vendor short list, as it were. Perhaps it also has something to do with why the DVD Forum moved the approval of WM9 from provisional to final recently in the HD spec. And it suggests that an announcement regarding the implementation of HD DVD in XBox 2 is higher in probability than it may have appeared.
Hopefully the decision to make Coral DRM open source will be viewed favorably by content owners bothered by the monopolistic tendencies of Microsoft and the failure of the DVD hardware vendors to create a CSS that lasted more than a few months before its keys were replicated throughout the internet.
Just another irony that the original motivation for cracking the DVD CSS was to play DVDs on a Linux PC.
posted by julia b schwerin