DRM and Approaches to Interoperability
Steve Jobs made headlines recently with his "Thoughts on Music." While a great deal has been written about Jobs offering to embrace the distribution of DRM free music, I thought his comments on interoperability were interesting. In Jobs' view, interoperability is achieved through licensing Apple's FairPlay to 3rd party device manufacturers. Microsoft has taken a very different approach to DRM interoperability.
First, Microsoft licenses its WMDRM platform to third parties for implementation on a wide variety platforms and services. Contrary to Jobs' assertion that maintaining DRM security is "near impossible" when the technology is licensed to third parties, third party implementations of WMDRM have proven to be fairly robust and the ecosystem has responded quickly to the inevitable breaches.
In addition to licensing, DRM interoperability can also be accomplished by design. Today Microsoft introduced Microsoft PlayReady, its next generation of content protection technology. PlayReady is already interoperable with DTCP, CPRM, and Helix DRM as a result of agreements between Microsoft and the entities behind those content protection systems. Moreover, 3rd parties can nominate other DRM systems and content protection technologies and request that Microsoft provide a “mapping” into that system. Once the mapping is established, content services can determine whether to allow their content to flow into that 3rd party system.
This multi-tiered approach allows services and device manufacturers to decide whether or not they want to provide DRM interoperability, and if they do, how they want to enable that interoperability. For example, if Apple wanted FairPlay to interoperate with PlayReady, we've got a couple of options for them to pick from.
February 12th, 2007 - 23:21
David,
Your interoperability arguement falls short unless you plan on putting your new DRM on music cds.
If there is no need to protect cds then there is no need to protect digtal music downloads.
There also no need for yet another Mircosoft DRM.
February 13th, 2007 - 10:19
In this post, I wasn’t taking a position one way or another on DRM. Ultimately, content owners will need to decide how they will distribute their content and what the usage rules will be if they choose to use DRM. My point is that DRM interoperability is not only possible, but is supported by Microsoft technologies.