Consumers are expected to resist if they can't convert content between devices, but the technology is not in place to enable any-to-any conversion.NEW YORK—Consumer acceptance will be critical to the success of DRM, but consumers are unlikely to accept digital rights management schemes that force them to wrestle with multiple, incompatible systems.
DRM technology leaders put their heads together at this week's DRM Strategies Conference & Expo to lay out a path to a better end-user experience.
"It's the iceberg that lies ahead of us," declared Knox Carey, director of technology initiatives for Intertrust Technologies, referring to the fact the consumers will increasingly want to play their digital content on all the media devices that they own.
"There are big risks to not addressing this immediately," he said, speculating that the lack of DRM interoperability will impede acceptance of new consumer electronic devices and create incentives for piracy. "It's getting easier every day," he said with regard to the constant increase in the availability of tools for unauthorized copying of protected content.
Moderator Nicholas R. Givotovsky, who is founder and president of Datasphere Interactive Inc., offered some thoughts on the mindset of DRM developers and end users when it comes to interoperability. "People mean different things when they say interoperability," he said, pointing out that many essential concepts are still not generally agreed upon by all players.
Click here to read how patent disputes are slowing the adoption of DRM.
Some of those critical concepts include the definition of fair use, or how much content can be viewed or played before incurring a fee. Also, there's no agreed definition of a domain, or the realm within which one consumer could use their content; it could be just home electronics, just mobile devices, just at the office, just in the car, it's not clear. Costs are also an unsettled issue; "Interoperability is something everybody wants, but nobody wants to pay for."
However true that is, DRM interoperability presents a very large challenge to technologists. Gord Larose, senior application security engineer for Cloakware Corp. pointed out the difficulty of getting a DRM system to ask a user the simple question "Who are you?" The answer might be a device ID, an account number, the name of the person who paid for the content, the name of the person who paid for the device, an IP address or any number of other variables.
Once you figure out the identity of the owner, you then need to deal with an endless list of possible descriptions of the piece of content you're managing and whether or not that content is attached to any descriptive metadata.
And once those major obstacles are cleared, you still need to make sure that the devices involved have the appropriate codecs and system requirements to run the particular item you're trying to play.
Many content managers are skittish about allowing secure content to be converted between formats on consumer-owned devices, since it's likely that at some time in the conversion process, the data will be unprotected and subject to piracy.
In Larose's view, the perfect world of DRM interoperability is not nearly at hand; "Any-to-any interoperability is not ready yet," he said, but "one-to-one interoperability is here now." He expressed some optimism that one-to-one interoperability might gradually evolve into any-to-any interoperability.
Rajan Samtani, director of sales and marketing for ContentGuard Inc., added that the most important factors are business issues. "Business intention to interoperate is the main gating factor," he said, "not technology."
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