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Can interoperability save DRM? -- Part II - May 2, 2007

In my last post, we examined the elimination of DRM as a solution to the interoperability problem.

Now let's look at efforts to develop a standard platform for allowing different DRM’s to interoperate.

At the LexisNexis DRM conference last week, co-sponsored by Content Agenda, Sony Pictures CTO Mitch Singer outlined a proposal to create a domain-level content management system, in which content registered with the domain could move freely among devices registered to the domain.

Jack Lacy of Intertrust, and the current president of the Coral Consortium, offered an overview of  the group's work on developing the technical platform to achieve domain-level management.

Both are discussed in my previous post.

Impressive as their work is, the rub for each will be securing the sort of near-universal buy-in from the hardware, content and IT industries, as well as platform providers and—not least—consumers, for domain-level management to provide the same sort of seamless experience that DRM-free movement of content (whether legal or illegal) already provides.

At the end of the LexisNexis conference, several participants hung around LA to attend the various DRM-related meetings there that dovetailed with our conference.

Among those was the inter-industry committee working on under the auspices of the DVD Copy Control Assn., to develop a system of “managed recording” of downloaded movies onto DVD-Rs using the CSS encryption system.

Also on the agenda is a plan for “managed copying” of CSS-protected DVDs into DRM-protected files on computer hard drives.

Both have been under discussion for more than two years.

Of the two, managed recording is closest to being done. In fact, most of the people involved in the discussions thought it was.

The technical issues had been worked out. Burning software was available to support it. The new type of pre-keyed DVD-R was approved by the DVD Forum.

But I'm hearing the whole edifice is suddenly in danger because the master CSS license has yet to be amended to give DVD-CCA the authority to start licensing managed-recording services and devices.

The master license is controlled by Toshiba and Matsushita, who developed CSS and own the IP. Both companies were intimately involved in the managed-recording and managed-copy discussions, leading everyone else to assume the amending the master license would be—to quote former-CIA chief George Tenet—“a slam-dunk.”

But now it appears to have run afoul of Toshiba's and Mutsushita's proprietary interests in other areas.

The two companies are on opposite sides of the high-def DVD divide. But each is keen to promote the transition to high-def platforms.

Anything that looks like it might extend the utility of the current DVD format now looks like a reason for consumers not to invest in the new formats.

Suddenly, neither Matsushita nor Toshiba is in a hurry to amend the master license to allow managed recording or copying to go forward.

Two years of painstaking negotiations, untold hours of technical work, an agreement finally reached, and in the end it founders on the hard reality of companies’ separate strategic interests.

That has been the history so far of inter-industry DRM negotiations (cf. SDMI).

And it's that history, more than any technical issues, which Coral and Sony will have to overcome.

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