Philips & Sony To Purchase Intertrust DRM Tech

tuxlove writes "Reuters is reporting that Philips and Sony Corp, the parents of the compact disc, teamed up on Wednesday to buy InterTrust Technologies for $453 million -- a deal expected to speed up copyright security for digital media. The acquisition by Philips Electronics and Sony of the leading U.S.-based holder of intellectual property in the field of 'digital rights management' technology is widely seen as a way to prevent Microsoft, which has been embroiled in a legal battle with InterTrust, from grabbing control of the potentially lucrative business. Philips and Sony, the electronics giants who introduced the CD format 20 years ago, said the deal would enable secure distribution of content as more films and music are sold over the Internet and other media in digital format."

Corrupt CDs

[yerricde]

So does this mean that Philips and Sony are now endorsing the production of digital audio discs that partially violate the Red Book standard?

This may not be bad after all

[myov]

"We come very much from the side of the consumer and we believe the consumer should have the right to reproduce content for their own use," said Philips spokesman Jeremy Cohen.

Re:Corrupt CDs

[Kierthos]

I consider it much more likely that Sony and Philips will try and figure out a decent(1) copy protection scheme(2) that will not violate the Red Book standard. I mean, after all, they created the standard.

(1) I.e. something that can't be defeated with a Sharpie.

(2) As in a plot, which will no doubt raise prices of CDs or at least keep them from dropping, like they should be.

Kierthos

Re:Question...

[Kierthos]

All too true. However, perception of artists can drastically influence album sales. Look at the whole R. Kelly thing. He had an album, which by industry and buying standards, should have been a major seller. Throw in a sex scandal, and it bombs.

It's all about perception. If the record companies, etc. perceive the "open source nutjobs" as a more significant force in the market then they actually are, then they will take notice. Of course, based on prior actions, they will unilaterally label all of them as "pirates".....

Kierthos

Re:Corrupt CDs

[JeremyALogan]

It might, very well, mean that they're buying it up to squash it. They have done much for the consumer in the way of our rights (such as forcing the different labels to NOT put the Compact Disc logo on discs that don't meet the Red Book standard). Maybe they're stepping up in support of THEIR technology.

Philips and Sony - A new era of coopetition?

[krazyninja]

As the originators of the CD format, Philips and Sony have been worried about the shifts in the market, due to undue restriction of the music distribution by DRM. This affected their revenues from royalty on CDs on one side, and affected the content market owned by Sony on the other side. With this deal, they can now hope to level the playing field. Till now, Philips has been seen to side with the customers [rollingstone.com], but Sony has traditionally stood for copyprotection with its key2audio technology. It would be interesting to see how the two merge their interests now.
This should also be seen in perspective with the recent news of Macrovision's acquisition of Midbar recently.

drm everywhere ....WHEN ...not IF

[Anonymous Coward]

we are all screwed.

fair use rights is definitely holding it's own...but the end could be in our lifetimes...and everything will be encrypted and locked up tight.

the whole idea of distributing 1's & 0's right now is soooo in it's infancy.

50 years from now...we will be laughed at...and digital freedom will be a fleeting memory.

enjoy it now.

Invest in security, DRM!

[Fastball]

Win this war on two fronts my fellow geeks. Of course oppose DRM, get your felt-tip markers out, brush up on your hexidecimal. But don't miss a chance to siphon off some dollar bills from these jokers. Companies that in the security and DRM business are going to be doing swift business whether any of us like it or the stuff they produce works. Seriously, consider buying stock in small-cap companies that show iniative in this industry.

Why? Because secure digital media is a contradiction in terms. It's one of those rarities in life that are so misunderstood and unviable that people are going to wage a war of attrition in its name. I, for one, am going to capitalize on that. All while burning my CDs to Ogg. :)

Re:Question...

[SJ]

Actually, the collective buying power of us "open source nutjobs" is a mole on the ass of the buying public. Whether we boycott or not, it won't be noticed in the aggregate against the masses buying Britney Spears and N'Sync.

Don't forget though, that all of us NutJobs are usually the "Technical Person" in our respective companies.

When I found out about BMG, I distributed a company wide email saying to be careful of anything produced by BMG because of copy protection.

I then defined copy protection as

1) Won't play on your car CD player
2) Won't play on your computer
3) Won't play on your older CD player
4) Can't be put on your favourite MP3 player
5) Can't be played on your DVD player
6) May not even work at all.

Sure some of it is FUD on my part, but I now have about 50 people consciously not buying BMG stuff.

We may only be a small group of people, but we have the ear of many many more consumers. Don't forget that simple fact.

Defending their back catalog ...

[LL]

The internet has suddenly exposed the distribution mechanism wide open. Historically it was easier popping down to the music store rather than advertising for the music you wanted. The sale of old CDs/vinyls through auction sites such as eBay means that what the major studios/distributors throught of as consumable good suddenly becomes a capital good. This is the difference between lease v sale and it is impossible to radically change the pricing least the consumers revolt. Attempts so far to move towards a licensing model (a la software) have been resisted by courts (cough*DVD*cough) and experiments in alternative protected media formats indicate dawning awareness that their knowledge in the retail distribution channel is at risk.

Digital Rights Management (or restrictions for the cynical) is a mechanism for asserting their traditional control which has been weakened by P2P and parallel importing. This is a logical business decision but I suspect that defending back catalogs means less attention being devoted to new services. Why can't people mix tracks to accompany their video handhelds? Why don't people dub skits to satirise stupid commercials? Why don't people create new GC sequences of Doom-like spoofs?

Hopefully we will be entertained by novel and innovative forms of media rather than being bombarded with rehashed old forms.

LL

Best solution I've seen so far...

[leabre]

I've seen a DRM for ebooks that I actually don't have any qualms with, and think it's the best that it can get and still be DRM, though I don't like DRM in the least...

It's called Libronix. Actually, it's primarily for religious publications... Libronix is an e-book reader and format... but I haven't seen any books non-Christian on the format... but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist... http://www.libronix.com

Here's how it works.

The system recognizes the "resources" that you supply it, usually from download or CD-ROM and then requres a license key... license key is keyed to the "activation" of the product. Basically, it says you can access these resources but not those ones...

You can copy the resources to any computer your want but only those PC that have a valid license can access them... if you're friend wants to, they can purchase a license from your copied file and view it themselves.

You can install the Librinix system on any other PC for backups and when it installs, just supply the activation confirmation supplied when originally activated and then "restore" the license key backed up and you can view it on any PC you want, that has your activation code. It doesn't restrict how many times you activate but you cannot use any license that was granted with an activation not your own.

This means you can use it on your 5 computers at home and your laptop but you can't necessarily do so on your friends PC unless you installed and used your activation and supply him your licences for each resource or collection of resources (I have 147 resources licensed to me)...

In all, it's fairly unintrusive but goes a long way against sharing unless you want your personal info distributed on the net...

That's the best (meaning least intrusive) implementation I've seen so far.

Thanks,
Leabre

Re:in retrospect...

[pavera]

I disagree that DRM will make it more difficult to pirate, the difficulty in pirating in the 80's wasn't so much making the copies of tapes as it was the distribution of said copies, same today, how many people really spend hours ripping their cd's to mp3?? I've only done maybe 15 of my cds (my favorites that I want to have everywhere) I own more than 200 cd's, so already making copies is too much of a hassle for the average joe. The difference now is that distribution is free, so you only need 1 person to go through the trouble of exploiting the analog hole, and walla the world has the stuff anyway. It is advances in distribution not ease of copying that has created more piracy today than 20 years ago, and DRM will not remove the ease of distribution.

Re:Corrupt CDs

[nosilA]

I recently heard the CEO of Sony America give a speech, and one of the things he did, amazingly, was acknowledge that CD prices are far too high and that is contributing to the decreased sales. I believe the exact quote was "You know we have a problem when it costs more to buy a CD than a DVD."

He also made some other statements that astonished me, supporting fair use, at least as long as Sony products were used... but it's a start. He mentioned copy protected CDs as a reality, but said that he wanted to find a solution that only keeps down the rampant copying over the internet, not your ability to make a copy to play in your car or create a mix MD for your girlfriend.

Sony isn't going to stand up for consumer rights, but their profit motives do tend to coincide fairly frequently.

-Alison