Managing Rights Management

Pointed Commentary on P2P File Sharing

Check out Lauren Weinstein's 60 second commentary on the efforts to hold P2P software companies responsible for piracy. His blog his here and the audio feed is here. Read more →

OMA Royalty Flap

According to a Reuters story that ran on Friday, consumer electronics companies are unhappy with the royalties proposed by OMA. Here's a portion of the story: A handful of technology companies are overcharging for anti-piracy software needed for digital music stores on the Internet, preventing the emergence of open standards,... Read more →

Who Is Making Money?

Many of the companies that specialize in DRM software are privately held. Consequently, little is known about their revenue and profitability. Many public companies active in rights management use their own proprietary system as a component of products or services -- Microsoft and Apple and Real come to mind --... Read more →

The Chilling Effect - Maybe

According to Reuters via CNN Money, the Motion Picture Association of America has filed suit against a number of John Doe's alleging that they misappropriated copyrighted movies. Excerpts: Studios sue traders of illegally copied films traded online, seek up to $150,000 per download. LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The civil suits... Read more →

Recently Published DRM Patent Applications

Every Thursday, the US Patent and Trademark Office publishes pending patent applications. Publication has no bearing on whether a patent will eventually be issued based on the application. Still, issued patents and published applications are often indicators of what people have been thinking about and the kinds of things that... Read more →

Wither Enterprise DRM Vendors?

What's the future of Enterprise DRM vendors such as Authentica, IntraWare, Liquid Machines, SealedMedia, to name a few? What strategies can companies like these employ to ensure not only that they survive, but thrive, especially when the need for Enterprise DRM-enabled applications is so great? Why do these questions arise... Read more →

Doonesbury and Barlow

In case you've been missing it, Gary Trudeau's Doonesbury comic strip this week has been addressing the music industry. Strip stalwart Jimmy Thudpucker in today's strip (February 24, 2005) being interviewed: "So Jimmy, You really think the collapse of the recording industry would be good for music? Absolutely. Without record... Read more →

Recently Issued DRM Patents

The US Patent Office issues new patents on Tuesdays. DRM continues to be an active area of innovation, including patents issued to leading DRM companies, such as Microsoft and ContentGuard. For example, two of the patents that issued recently relating to DRM are: 6,859,533, "System and method for transferring the... Read more →

Doubling Up

The number of people reporting that theyhad bought music on the net doubled from 2003 to 2004, this according to a research report liberally quoted by Barry L. Ritholtz. The excerpt doesn't indicate what happened to dollars spent over the same interval. Read more →

FCC Hears Arguments In HDTV Case

According to Reuters, A U.S. appeals court on Tuesday said that regulators had overstepped their authority by imposing a rule designed to limit the copying of digital television programs. "You crossed the line," Judge Harry Edwards told a lawyer for the Federal Communications Commission during arguments before a three-judge panel... Read more →

Barry Ritholtz, "The False Economics of the RIAA

Do people mainly P2P download songs they wouldn't otherwise buy? Do musicians make most of their money from performances? Economist and blogger Barry Ritholtz answers these and other questions and in doing so, does a couple of numbers on The False Mathematics of the RIAA and ignited a small firestorm... Read more →

DRM-enabled Fair Use

Prof. Pasi Tyrvainen at the University of Jyväskylä has written an article on "Concepts and a Design for Fair Use and Privacy in DRM" published in the February issue of D-Lib Magazine. The article is well worth reading. [Some background material on Fair Use can be found at various places... Read more →

The Age of Ego Casting

Off topic for this blog (another is in the works), but Christine Rosen's article in The New Atlantis on The Age of Ego Casting might be of interest. Thanks to Bob Horn for the pointer to the article and to the publication, which I had not seen before. Read more →

Gord Larose on DRM

Take a look at Gord Larose on DRM. Lots of useful information. The DRM graveyard page should be of particular interest to those with a historical bent. So much for first mover advantages. It would appear that with notable exceptions, it's the third generation of DRM companies that starts to... Read more →

Scientific American Copyright

The February issue of Scientific American includes Scientific American: Beyond the Big © Copyright becomes "no right to copy". Chief among the interesting aspects is what one has to do to get the link shown just above. The web page with the article has a menu that includes the item... Read more →

Gizmo Extinctions

An article published by BBC news says that legal actions are threatening the very existence of a broad range of CE appliances, computing, and communications technologies. Endangered animals lists are familiar to those who care about nature, but now technology has its own list of gadget "species" under threat of... Read more →

EFF End User License Agreement Press Release

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) issued a press release and white paper calling attention to the dangers of EULAs (End User License Agreements). The release says in part: San Francisco - Today the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) released a white paper warning consumers about how they can be harmed by... Read more →

An Intellectual Property Joke

An intellectual property attorney at a large New York law firm turned 40 and had a midlife crisis. He resigned his senior partnership and began to travel the world in search of enlightenment. While in India, he heard about a holy man, a guru, who had been sitting on the... Read more →

The Superdistribution Chronicles, Pt. 1

Superdistribution was coined by Ryoichi Mori in a 1989 article entitled "What lies ahead". Reduced to its essence, superdistribution refers to turning consumers into (re)distributors. Using DRM systems, superdistribution promised--depending on the preferences of content producers, distributors, and redistributors--to increase revenue for rights holders and create revenue opportunities for consumers.... Read more →

Apple, Sony Sued For Proprietary DRM Systems

This according to an eWeek article that says in part: A French consumer organization has launched legal action against Sony and Apple, claiming that the two companies are limiting user choice by using proprietary digital rights management software systems for music downloads. The Union Fédérale des Consommateurs-Que Choisir claimed it... Read more →

Insinuations: Microsoft, Nokia, OMA

Several news outlets covered today's story regarding Microsoft and Nokia partnering up. Here's one. Nokia will make use of Microsoft's DRM 10. The agreement also indicates future interoperability between DRM 10 and OMA, the standard for mobile phone DRM, giving Microsoft a foothold on the mobile platform. Read more →

MSFT and DRM

Brier Dudley has a longish (for a newspaper) article in the Seattle Times that overviews Microsoft's evolving security and DRM strategy. Worth a read. Read more →

Thinking Of Munch's "The Scream"

The Associated Press [via Excite] reported that Norway's parliament on Friday proposed a new copyright law to make it illegal for Norwegians to copy songs from their own CDs onto MP3 players, but legal to do so for making a CD duplicate. The proposal, intended to bring Norway's law in... Read more →

Cash Registers And DRM Data Collection

The European Union has issued a draft document addressing the privacy of individuals interacting with DRM-enabled applications and services. The EU Data Privacy Directive is far more protective of personal information than corresponding laws and regulations in the United States. A simplification, the EU is "opt-in" while the US is... Read more →

Isn't Rights Management an Oxymorn?

Molly Wood raises this question in her February 8 Anchor Desk column. The daily Anchor Desk email newsletter puts it this way: LIVING IT: Molly doesn't buy clothes she can wear only at Safeway, and she doesn't buy shoes that protect her feet only on Tuesdays. She doesn't buy food... Read more →

Liquid Machines, Code Rewrite

Various approaches to cross-platform and cross-application interoperability have been suggested. One idea is an interpreted DRM virtual machine (a Java-like VM but for rights management). However appealing, so far this approach seems mainly to push important difficult security issues down into the DRM-VM. Cross-application interoperability has been attempted by using... Read more →

What's Changed

Again, in no particular order: The level of conflict is at an all-time high, especially in the consumer space, as illustrated by the the RIAA and MPAA lawsuits against consumers and by the virtual demonization of the media companies by certain consumer advocates. Having settled the InterTrust patent lawsuit, Microsoft... Read more →

What's Remained The Same

In no particular order: Discussion of DRM is framed in terms of freedom and creativity vs control and greed. The markets for enterprise and consumer solutions are largely distinct. After a round of consolidation and failure, venture money again flowed into DRM-related start-ups. Hope springs eternal on the part of... Read more →

So What Is Rights Management

Here is my definition: Rights Management is the association of rules governing use and use consequences with digital information of all kinds and the enforcement of those rules at a distance in time and space. Note that there is no reference to encryption or security in this definition even though... Read more →

Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose

The more things change, the more they stay the same. So it is with rights management. From 1990 until the end of 1995 I was a Principal at Northeast Consulting Resources (NCRI) before it was acquired by NerveWire. For companies large and small, my consulting practice was focused on the... Read more →