Sender ID added to Microsoft’s Open Specification Promise
Microsoft today announced that the four specifications that make up Sender ID are being made available under Microsoft's Open Specification Promise (OSP). Jason and Brent have comments on the announcement and how making Sender ID patents available under the OSP fits into Microsoft's approach to interoperability.
Standards usually don't make the front page of the Washington Post, but Sender ID did. For that reason alone, Sender ID is not your everyday standard. The hope behind Sender ID was to provide a widely deployed system to authenticate email. When Sender ID was brought to the IETF, Microsoft, in accordance with IETF polices, disclosed the existence of its pending patent claims. Microsoft also agreed to license its patent claims on the Sender ID specification on reasonable and nondiscriminatory terms without royalty.
It's important to point out that this disclosure went beyond IETF requirements, which require patents be disclosed but does not prohibit licensing on a royalty basis. Microsoft's intent was to foster the wide adoption of the Sender ID specification by offering its necessary patents to implementers at no charge or royalty. Microsoft's royalty free terms, however, were met with opposition primarily from the open source community. Despite this opposition, more than 5 million domain holders have adopted Sender ID.
The reason I bring up this history is to show how Microsoft's approach to standards licensing is evolving. When Microsoft offered to make its necessary patents available to Sender ID implementers on royalty free RAND terms, Microsoft was in fact making its patents available under one of its most permissive licensing approaches (and one that was never, to my knowledge, greeted with the kind of opposition it received at the IETF, home of many royalty based standards). To be clear, Microsoft's goal was to license its technology in a manner that would encourage adoption. Since that time, Microsoft has spent a great amount of effort refining its standards licensing approaches and working with the community to find new approaches to standards based licensing. One result of that process has been Microsoft's adoption of the OSP - an approach that was not available to Microsoft when Sender ID was brought to the IETF.
Although the application of the OSP to Sender ID has been warmly received (as has the OSP's application to certain WS specs and the Virtual Hard Disk Image Format Specification), a comment by Rich Jennings about Sender ID and the OSP caught my attention.
As far as I can tell, nothing has changed. There's no news here. Move along.
This promise seems to be exactly the same promise as was made by Microsoft in 2004. It's a promise that didn't prevent the MARID working group from failing to reach consensus -- mainly due to deadlock over the IP issue.
Although I've posted about the OSP before, I think it's important to emphasize that the OSP is in fact a different approach to standards licensing than royalty free RAND licensing. A royalty free RAND license, despite being free, does require implementers to actually obtain that license. The OSP does not require an implementer to come to Microsoft for that license. This also removes issues related to sublicensing, which is of concern to the open source community, since the OSP extends directly to each user of the spec. These are a few of the several reasons why the OSP has received the support of companies including Red Hat and SendMail. It's Microsoft's hope that the OSP's application to Sender ID will in fact resolve lingering IP licensing issues related to Sender ID.
DDEX Announces its Standards
The Digital Data Exchange, also known as DDEX, just announced the establishment of its first four standards. DDEX is an organization that establishes music meta data standards to enable more efficient exchanges of music related data. This includes information not only about the content, but also information that helps transaction processing between participants in the digital music supply chain.
DDEX board members include a wide range of companies involved in the music ecosystem such as EMI Music, SONY BMG MUSIC ENTERTAINMENT, Warner Music Group, Universal Music Group, The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), The Harry Fox Agency Inc. (HFA), The MCPS-PRS Alliance Limited, Sociedad General de Autores y Editores, AOL, LLC, Apple Computer Inc., Microsoft Corporation and RealNetworks Inc. More information about DDEX can be found at its website.
I've had the opportunity to work with DDEX and its members from the founding stages of the organization almost a year ago. During this relatively short time, we've established the underpinnings of the organization, including the corporate structure and Intellectual Property Rights Policy, and completed the first set of standards.
DDEX is a great example of a standards organization done right. It was established to solve a set of common problems among members of the digital music supply chain. Prior to DDEX, digital service providers, labels, and rights societies used different systems to communicate music related data. The result was a tower of babel that required each party in the chain to maintain multiple systems at great expense. The lack of common communication mechanisms made it difficult to leverage existing infrastructures to provide new music related offerings to consumers. Transaction costs were also high since any change to the existing individual formats required one off negotiations and technical implementations.
By agreeing to implement a common meta data standard, each DDEX implementer can communicate in a more efficient way and provide more and higher quality services to end users. At the same time, implementers can rely upon the base DDEX standards for common, cross industry tasks while maintaining the ability to innovate on top of the DDEX standards. The outcome is extremely pro-competitive, providing benefits to implementers and consumers.
Back from the DVD CCA
I'm currently airborne flying back from a DVD CCA meeting in LA. The DVD CCA is the licensing body that determines how protected content on DVD discs can be used and what types of features can be included in DVD players for computers and consumer electronic devices.
By way of background, the DVD CCA is a rather unique organization. Though DVD CCA resembles a standards body in many ways, it doesn't generally establish technical specifications. Rather, the DVD CCA is responsible for licensing the Content Scrambling System to implementers, which is licensed to the DVD CCA by CSS's owners and developers, MEI and Toshiba.
The DVD CCA is comprised of companies from the motion picture, consumer electronics, and computer industries. For any changes to be made to the CSS rules, all three industries must agree to the changes. As you can imagine, achieving changes, improvements, and new business models in DVD CCA requires a great deal of compromise. It's a challenging and often fruitless exercise for all involved. It demands a large amount of resources to engage. It's also an incredibly time consuming process where success is measured in inches and rarely in feet.
DVDs have been one of the most successful consumer electronic products in history. There has been no other consumer electronic device that has achieved such a high rate of adoption in such a short period. DVD sales have also propelled content industry sales - from old and new releases to television shows.
With all that success, however, there is something that you haven't seen from DVD CCA lately, and that's innovation. Because of its governance structure and the competing interests of its participants, DVDs have been largely stagnate.
The DVD CSS system has been completely broken and the enthusiast community has developed compelling, polished, and unsanctioned applications that include DVD jukeboxes and enhanced quality outputs. At the same time, legitimate CSS implementers cannot match these innovations since they are bound by the CSS rules.
The point is that industry standards can be a double edged sword. They can lay the groundwork for widespread consumer adoption, but they can also slow or prevent progress. DVDs will be with us forthe foreseeable future, but without innovation, DVDs will in time be replaced with systems and business models that better meet new consumer expectations.