THE SEVENTIES WERE a simpler decade than the current one for a whole host of reasons. Here’s just one: You saved your allowance to buy the latest ABBA album. You owned it, so you could play it on any of the record players in your house, or play it at your friend Suzy’s house, or lend it to your buddy Joe for as long as you wanted him to have it.

The introduction of digital music has changed that scenario dramatically. Now you might download a song from the Apple® iTunes Music Store® online music website to your Apple iPod® mobile digital device. But do you actually own that music? Or do you just own certain rights to it? How, if at all, do you share it?

The astonishing success of the iTunes Music Store website, where users pay per song to download digital versions of music, has answered the question of whether consumers will fork over money for digital content with a resounding “Yes!”. Now the question being asked by the music industry is not so much “Will they do it?” but “How do we control it?”

“There’s a huge disconnect in the industry,” says John Brand, senior vice president of technology research services for Meta Group. “Consumers believe they’re buying music, and the music industry believes it’s selling pieces of plastic or magnetic tape or vinyl. Until there’s some coming together of those divergent perspectives, the problem will continue.”

That’s where digital rights management technology, or DRM, comes into play. DRM technology enables vendors of digital content to grant specific usage rights to consumers, spelling out whether and how many times content can be copied, shared or transferred between devices. “DRM technology enforces the contract that the consumer has with the content owner,” says Chris Parkerson, product marketing manager of developer solutions for RSA Security.

While the music industry is by far the most visible DRM application, the technology has long been used to prevent copying of gaming CDs, and it can be applied to any file or document. That creates implications for enterprises needing to control information access to comply with regulations such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

THE ABCS OF DRM
While DRM technology encompasses myriad methods of protecting content, the system most prevalent right now works in the following way:

Let’s say a user wants to download a song from the iTunes Music Store website onto an Apple iPod device. Software behind the scenes on the website encrypts, or “wraps,” the song in a certain way, protecting it from unauthorized use or sharing. Software on the iPod device uses the same technology to “unwrap” the song, allowing the owner to play it.

Apple uses its own DRM technology. Napster™ employs Microsoft® DRM technology for the same purpose. And the list goes on. That sheer variety of DRM technologies is part of the frustration for consumers, who want something called content portability—to be able to play music they bought from one source in their cars, on their computers and on their iPod devices. “Consumers want to be able to take what they believe is their material with them wherever they go,” says Brand. But “if content comes wrapped in one type of DRM technology and you try to play it on something that can’t unwrap that technology, it won’t work,” Parkerson explains. Eventually, such incompatibility may leave consumers too irritated or confused to reach into their pockets at all—and that’s a possibility that has the content creators very worried.

One solution is to create a common technology link that unites users, content and distribution services. To that end, the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA), a consortium of 200 companies that develops technology standards for the mobile industry, has developed standards for digital content. The newest of these is OMA DRM 2.0, which RSA Security co-authored and which will soon be built into a large number of mobile phones. The goal of the open standard is to eventually erase lines of demarcation by having every consumer electronic device and all the digital content wrapped in the same standards. Members of the consortium, which includes most major record labels and music studios, believe that an open, standards-based architecture will allow both device manufacturers and content providers to give consumers more portability.

FUTURE POSSIBILITIES
Forthcoming solutions from RSA Security can give mobile device manufacturers and mobile network operators the infrastructure and software they need to implement the mobile DRM standards. The consortium hopes that general consumer device manufacturers will eventually adopt the standard for use in non-mobile devices like CD players. One day, says Parkerson, a consumer should be able to buy a piece of content from a content service that’s wrapped in the OMA technology and use it on any device with the OMA technology.

Content owners stand to benefit as well. “Vendors get peace of mind from knowing that their rights are going to be enforced consistently,” says Parkerson. Because the OMA technology is an open standard, content owners are making sure that new capabilities like legal peer-to-peer sharing are part of the architecture. This allows individuals, for example, to send a message to a friend (“You’ve got to hear this new song by a band I just discovered”), with a link embedded in the message that allows the friend to preview (and possibly purchase) the content.

Currently, because DRM rights—the contract that says what you can do with the material—are hardwired into individual software, viral marketing among products from different vendors is impossible—that is, an Apple iTunes® program user can’t share content with a Napster user, Parkerson explains. With the flexible OMA model, a record company can easily grant a consumer the right to share the first 30 seconds of a song with 10 friends on 10 different devices from different vendors. With that approach, standards creators say, both sides win.

While DRM has uses beyond the music industry, the consumer space is currently the largest battlefield. Other groups are also developing standards; if OMA has to duke it out with them, things could get bloody. Whatever happens, it’s a sure bet that both consumers and content creators are watching closely to see what happens when the dust settles.

By Meg Mitchell Moore
Illustration by Adam McCauley

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