Managing Rights Management

InformationWeek - Another Apple Anti-trust Law Suit

InformationWeek reports that another anti-trust suit requesting class action status has been filed against Apple. To promote interoperability, part of the suit demands that Apple open its platforms to other DRM standards and media formats. But in all these cases the first order of business is to assert that the company in fact has one or more monopolies:

The complaint against Apple claims that the company controls 75% of the online video market, 83% of the online music market, more than 90% of the hard-drive based music player market, and 70% of the Flash-based music player market.

Digital Living Network Alliance to Issue Interoperable DRM RFP

EE TImes says that the Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) will issue an RFP for interoperable DRM perhaps based on the work of the CORAL Consortium.

Scott Smyers, president of DLNA, said he has seen evidence content and service providers are beginning to work with Coral's technology. An increasing number of the companies have been actively participating in DLNA recently. They have formed their own task group within DLNA and have been engaged in the DRM effort, Smyers said.  Coral essentially described a method in which content or service providers can express in a standard manner the digital rights a user has purchased with a piece of content. Those rights can then be transferred from the DRM used in one system to the DRM in another.

Standardizing rights expression is, of course, an important prerequisite for interoperability. More important and difficult problems result from the fact that classes of devices and members of the same device class may vary in their abilities to enforce the rights associated with protected content. For example, there needs to be agreement regarding what happens when content shows up on a device that lacks the sophistication to enforce the associated rights. Does the device refuse to play the content? Are the rights ignored?