An industry movement to standardize the way you link your PC to your MP3
player to your television is ironically going forward without a clear sense
of how to protect the content in the first place.
And it seems like the biggest names in tech are waiting for the problem
to fix itself.
According to industry statistics, massive numbers of households are
networking their homes to be able to take Internet content like music,
movies and photos and play them back on multiple devices.
According to a Jupiter Research Home Networking Report, one-third of
broadband users are interested in installing a home network to listen to
music files on a home stereo.
Furthermore, Parks Associates forecasts a five-fold increase in products
connected in entertainment-centric home networks by the end of 2007. The
report estimates there will be 35 million nodes in U.S. homes by the end of
the year; 65 million in 2004; 95 million in 2005; 136 million in 2006; and
183 million in 2007.
The trend sparked a 17-company initiative to ensure interoperability
among CE devices, PCs, and mobile devices. Dubbed the Digital Home Working Group (DHWG), the
non-profit organization says it will build a platform based on certain
technical design guidelines using industry standards.
“Consumers are acquiring, experiencing, and managing an increasing amount
of digital media using their digital consumer electronics (CE) devices, home
PCs, and mobile devices such as PDAs and mobile phones,” the group states in
its literature.
Using the standard interoperability platform, the DHWG promises
manufacturers will then be able to use the specs to develop digital home
products that share content through wired or wireless networks in the home.
But the one thing deemed so important to content providers, the recording
industry and the movie industry — Digital Rights Management and Content
Protection (DRM/CP) — is the only thing on the group’s list of technologies
that has no suggestions and no apparent roadmap.
The reason, according to Content Guard CEO Michael Miron: they haven’t
decided on a standard — yet.
DRM is important, but there are still proprietary DRM platforms and if
you have different proprietary solutions, you have a tower of Babel, Miron
told internetnews.com. “The group will get to it but it doesn’t want
to duplicate efforts.
Miron should know, his company is one of a handful working to bring a
standard digital rights expression language to the industry. The Bethesda,
MD-based company is working with standards bodies such as MPEG, OASIS and
Open eBook Forum (OeBF) to encourage cooperation on technologies.
DHWG’s membership reads like a “Who’s, Who” of tech giants, including:
Fujitsu, Gateway, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, IBM, Kenwood, Lenovo, Matsushita
Electric (Panasonic), Microsoft, NEC CustomTechnica, Nokia, Philips,
Samsung, Sharp, Sony, STMicroelectronics and Thomson.
But Miron says getting all of those companies to agree on one standard is
not really all that critical at this point because the group’s roadmap for
DRM/CP doesn’t hit a critical point until the 2005-2006 timeframe.
“They’re on a pretty ambitious schedule,” Miron says. “Right now they are
looking on how to how to combine things into an implementation stack. Each
piece is out there, but without the guts, then you don’t have the reason to
protect the content.”
So what will be the dominant technology to rule them all? Miron thinks he
knows.
MPEG May Hold the Key
There are a bunch of different rights languages available, including
High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP), eXtensible rights Markup
Language (XRML) and Digital Property Rights Language (DPRL), but Miron says
the furthest ahead and the one with the best chance at winning is MPEG-21.
“The people behind XMCL thought that it would be merged into something
else but never really went anywhere,” said Miron. “There is also Open
Digital Rights Language — or ODRL — from Australia. Head to head, its the
only competition with MPEG that had a chance, but they lost head to head.”
MPEG-21 is based on two essential concepts: the definition of a
fundamental unit of distribution and transaction (the Digital Item) and the
concept of Users interacting with Digital Items. The Digital Items can be
considered the “what” of the Multimedia Framework (e.g., a video collection,
a music album) and the Users can be considered the “who” of the Multimedia
Framework.
Miron says the mathematical breakdown of DRM/CP leaves itself wide open
for ambiguities.
“The last thing you want is ambiguities,” Miron says. “If I say you have
the right to play this song once, you know what I mean. But when you give
that instruction to a machine, does it mean it gets to play it only one
time, or does it mean one time on only this machine, or does it mean one
time on several machines.”
The group behind MPEG-21 says it makes things clearer by defining the
syntax and semantics of their characteristics, such as interfaces to the
elements, “in an efficient, transparent and interoperable way.”
The technology is showing such advanced promise, that at its Annual
Meeting in Montreal last month, the MPEG-4 Industry Forum (M4IF) unanimously
approved expanding its scope to include the promotion of the MPEG-7 and
MPEG-21 standards. The group has also changed its name to the “MPEG Industry
Forum.”
DHWG says any format it chooses must be an open standard that has been
formally ratified by an internationally recognized standards organization,
and IP must be licensed under reasonable, non-discriminatory terms.
Given that criterion, Miron says MPEG-21 may have the best chance.
