Flow ControlHaving an actionable digital rights management vision can lead to important competitive advantages
By Darin Stewart Continued from Page 1 The two main advantages of OS-level DRM are application neutrality and security. These DRM solutions are not bound to any particular viewer or player and are effectively transparent to the application. As a result, users are free to pick best-of-breed viewing applications for their needs while retaining the security benefits of a single encryption mechanism working at a very low level, making hacking into the content extremely difficult. While this approach has advantages in a closed environment such as an enterprise network, it may cause some difficulties in a B2B environment where the supplier and recipient have adopted different and potentially conflicting platforms. The main obstacle that vendors offering OS-level solutions will have to overcome is that it is difficult to effectively bolt solutions into an operating system rather than engineering them in from the beginning. Current producers of these systems are scrambling to secure OEM deals in order to incorporate their solutions into devices before they enter the market. However, with Microsoft's recent announcement that it intends to incorporate a proprietary DRM solution into future versions of Windows, these vendors face an uphill battle and a rapidly closing window of opportunity. Most DRM vendors are opting to work at the application level, extending existing viewers, readers, and players through plug-ins. This approach essentially turns an application with no DRM capabilities into an integral component of a rights management system. In this approach, the content publisher either modifies the digital content itself or wraps it in a DRM shell, often adding an identifying file extension indicating the DRM scheme applied. A solution-specific plug-in is provided to let the reader itself open and decrypt the content when an appropriate license is acquired. Application-level DRM has the advantage of simplicity of deployment, ease of upgrade, and the familiarity of the reading application's look and feel. The simplicity of this approach doesn't come without cost. Of greatest concern to content publishers and providers is the fact that applications providing open hooks for plug-ins are much more susceptible to hacking than a solution buried in the operating system. While DRM vendors are working diligently to rectify this problem, it is generally considered an inherent risk of the plug-in approach. To users, the problem lies in the proliferation of plug-ins that must be installed and maintained if they want to accept content from multiple sources, each of which may have their own mutually exclusive approach to rights management. At this stage of the game, there is no interoperability between plug-ins and application extensions in the DRM space. Even within a single vendor problems can (and have) arisen. A file encoded in a standard format, such as PDF, can generally be opened in its native form by multiple applications from various vendors across multiple platforms. When it has been DRM encoded, however, it may be locked across those same platforms even if the plug-ins on both sides are from the same vendor. In this situation, you would need multiple copies of a single piece of content, each encoded for a particular platform, if you wanted to move it from your laptop to your workstation or PDA. IN SEARCH OF A LINGUA FRANCAThis untenable situation has arisen from the fact that every vendor describes and implements the business rules governing content usage in its own idiosyncratic way. What we need is a lingua franca of digital rights business rules. Such a standardized language would enable all DRM vendors and their solutions to come together on the back end and exchange information in a manner completely transparent to the user. This solution would not only simplify life for users and IT departments by eliminating the need for multiple plug-ins, but it would dramatically reduce costs for publishers. With a common business rules language available, content providers could package content just once to the standard's specifications rather than once for each potential DRM platform. In addition, such behind-the-scenes interoperability would increase the quality of service in DRM solutions, eliminating many opportunities for error in translating rules from one system to the next. Two efforts to provide such a language have recently appeared: the Extensible Rights Management Language (XRML) from Xerox offshoot ContentGuard, and Extensible Media Commerce Language (XMCL), which is being developed by a coalition of industry players including Adobe, Accenture, Napster, and IBM. Both approaches are open, XML-based descriptive languages promising a transparent, standardized method for specifying rights and licenses associated with the protection and use of digital content. Both standards are available on a royalty-free, licensed basis. The primary difference between the two initiatives is a matter of scope. While XMCL focuses on the description of business rules, XRML encompasses the end-to-end DRM process. The choice to be made by the industry is between simplicity and comprehensiveness. This decision will be settled in the DRM market over the coming year. TRICKY BUSINESSThe coming year will also largely determine the shape of the DRM industry as a whole. Despite the universally acknowledged need for control and protection of digital media and a potential market projected to reach over $2 billion by 2004, vendors attempting to enter the DRM arena have had a tough time getting a foothold, and many have recently been forced to scale back operations or even close their doors. DRM adoption is a tricky business, and content owners and publishers are being cautious. In addition to the technical hurdles to be overcome, publishers are reluctant to jeopardize the tried-and-true revenue streams of traditional media delivery by opening a new and unproven channel. Overarching all concerns is uncertainty in the legal realm. Privacy concerns, fair use, and royalty obligations are still being sorted out in boardrooms, legislatures, and courtrooms. Until the dust settles, most participants in the digital content world will remain DRM-agnostic. COMMERCIAL SOLUTIONS: ADOBE AND MICROSOFT VIE FOR DRM DOMINANCEThe DRM marketplace is a volatile playing field. Illustrative of this is the recent announcement by Xerox spin-off ContentGuard, until recently a front-runner in the DRM market, that it would discontinue all service offerings and focus instead on the development of XRML. DRM is new and unfamiliar territory to most information managers, and as a result they seem to be seeking out the familiar. Not surprisingly, Microsoft and Adobe have taken the lead for DRM dominance. The Windows Media Rights Manager is rapidly becoming a de facto standard for securing multimedia content such as audio and video files. Media Rights Manager, first released in August 1999, is now in its second generation with v. 7.1 released in September 2001. The Microsoft offering rests on a client/server architecture supporting both downloading and streaming of content. Both client and server SDKs are provided, allowing applications to be extended to support protecting and accessing DRM encoded media. The tight integration of MS-DRM with the various Windows platforms makes deployment reasonably comfortable. However, this same tight integration makes interaction with other DRM platforms problematic, largely binding the enterprise to an end-to-end Microsoft solution. In the realm of online publishing and electronic documents, Adobe has staked out its claim with PDF Merchant and Web Buy. PDF Merchant takes advantage of the standardization and flexibility of XML to integrate DRM early in the value chain, assigning access rights to documents in the portable document format (PDF). Web Buy adds the access mechanisms required to read these protected documents to Adobe Acrobat and Acrobat Reader. In addition, Web Buy facilitates secure transactions between supplier and consumer according to whatever distribution scheme the publisher devises. While these DRM platforms have taken an early lead in the marketplace, broad adoption and integration will ultimately determine their long-term viability. To facilitate this adoption, both Microsoft and Adobe have formed alliances with content providers such as Barnes & Noble and Fatbrain and DRM service providers such as CyberTrust and InterTrust, which are integrating these technologies into their proprietary offerings. Even these high-profile partnerships may not be enough to guarantee the longevity of any DRM platform. Reciprocal's Digital Clearing Service was one of the first and strongest contenders for DRM service dominance. Despite strategic partnerships with both Microsoft and Adobe (and a $100 million market cap less than two years ago), Reciprocal recently closed its doors. Darin Stewart [darin@centerspan.com] is principal information architect for CenterSpan Communications, producers of the C-star content delivery network. RESOURCESAdobe: www.adobe.com/epaper ContentGuard: www.contentguard.com Microsoft Media Rights Manager: www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/drm.asp
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