I had a meeting this morning with some people from the Open Mobile Alliance, who were, um, kind enough to add the chair of their DRM working group to the meeting (without my knowledge, although I didn’t really mind), to address my fairly strong feelings about it. OMA’s in an interesting position on this and a lot of matters in the mobile industry. The group was essentially born out of the realization by vendors and carriers that they needed to work together to ensure interoperability of services — “The industry has gone through a tough school and learned its lesson,” as chair Jari Alvinen put it.
They made the case for their unified, open DRM standard, and were quick to draw a distinction between actual DRM and simple copy protection, since the two aren’t necessarily the same. While the OMA DRM spec does include copy protection (so you can’t forward a ringtone to your friend, for instance), it also features some actual DRM that enables some new business models and revenue streams. For instance, it’s got a mechanism that allows users to pass content on to others, who can then preview it and decide to pay for it if they want to keep it, and it’s even got “reward” functionality to encourage people to pass around content in this way. It also allows people to define “domains” of devices to which they can assign the same rights, so if you buy a song on your phone, you could also play it on your computer or on your home stereo and so on.
I’m still not sure what to make of this. While clearly the spec does allow for some new business models, why does it take an OMA DRM standard, rather than some innovation from record labels or some other content provider, to come up with them? It also still doesn’t address copy protection being used as lock-in by vendors. It’s true that the OMA DRM spec is open and can be licensed by anyone (the group’s IP policy dictates all its specs’ underlying technology be made available on a RAND basis), but is that any different that Microsoft licensing its Janus DRM to anybody that ponies up the cash? The idea of a unified DRM across all devices is a decent one — if it were a reality. And while OMA DRM will no doubt fall into favor simply because of the high volume of handsets sold a year, it’s still up to individual device manufacturers to license the different DRMs and integrate them into their devices if they care about interoperability. While the number of major DRM technologies may have declined in recent years to 3 (MS, Apple/Fairplay, OMA), that’s still too many when it’s used not as DRM, but as a tool to lock people in to certain brands.
I appreciate the work OMA’s done to make the DRM useful to content providers and to consumers by enabling new businesses. But is it just a case of adding sugar to the medicine to make it go down easier? I hope not. They seem to have a good idea of what they’re doing and the impact it will have on consumers (both negative and positive) and also that they’re working in a communications medium, not a broadcast one — a point they made explicitly, and one that’s lost on a lot of companies. A unified standard, properly implemented, would be an improvement over the current situation. But when the point of DRM and copy protection often isn’t to manage digital rights, but to lock people in to certain products, it’s hard to believe that it’s coming any time soon.
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