You are previewing premium content. New industry group tries its hand at DRM
In the latest effort to respond to the threat from online piracy, a group of large media and technology companies Wednesday unveiled a new specification for a technology that will distribute digital content to consumers online while honoring complex contractual relationships that exist among media owners.
The group, which calls itself the Content Reference Forum (CRF), is a new, cross-industry standards organization that counts leading technology and media companies as members, including Universal Music Group, Microsoft, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) and VeriSign, according to a statement released by the group.
The goal is to design a technology platform that enables media companies and other digital content owners to distribute content across different technology environments and geographical regions, according to Albhy Galuten, chairman of the CRF and a former advanced technical lead at Universal Music Group.
"Nobody has addressed the issues of how to make (online content distribution) effective and seamless," he said.
For example, a Top 10 music file link from a music fan in the U.S. that is sent to a friend in France should take into account that user's language preferences. Also, if the user does not personally own a copy of the song, they should be able to purchase it in a way that takes into account the various contractual agreements that music companies and distributors have for music sales in France, Galuten said.
"It's a means to resolve a content reference so that consumers can locate, buy and acquire appropriate instances of that content," he said.
Current online music and content distribution services, such as Apple's iTunes and Roxio's Napster, amount to a balkanization of the music industry, with companies building their own distribution systems to encourage sales of other products, such as the iPod portable music player, Galuten said.
"There's no reason you shouldn't have access to the first Led Zeppelin album on a Sony device, your PC or Napster," he said.
The draft specifications, known as the CRF Baseline Profile v1.0, were published for public comment Wednesday on the group's Web site. The specifications cover formats for "Content References," which the CRF defines as "data packages that uniquely identify content and the context in which it will be used." That might include information about the consumer's specific environment, Galuten said.
Also explained in the specifications is a new language called the "Contracts Expression Language" (CEL) that is designed to "express and enforce contractual agreements." That will allow information in a content link to be compared against a database of contractual agreements, so companies can ensure that the appropriate compensation is paid to each "value chain player" that helped that user obtain the media, he said.
The CRF will build on the work of other standards groups such as the Moving Pictures Experts Group (MPEG) 21 and the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), Galuten said. "We're not trying to reinvent the wheel," he said.
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