As I mentioned last issue, I used to think that Sara Gates' title of vice president of identity for Sun was the neatest one in high tech. But after meeting a fellow Sun exec last week, I no longer think it's the neatest title at Sun - that prize goes to Chris Mellissinos, whose job is chief gaming officer. How neat is that?

I met with Mellissinos last week, along with other Sun execs: Tom Jacobs, Sun Labs director of engineering, Stefan Rust, director of corporate and industry strategy, and Katherine Parker, global business development manager, media and entertainment industry sales. That's right, media and entertainment. They were all in town for the Digital Hollywood meeting in San Jose described by the organizers as: "The premier event for transforming entertainment, communication technologies and the global communications network: TV, cable, telco, consumer electronics, mobile, broadband, search and e-mail, VoIP, RSS, blogs and Web sites."

So what did Sun have to do with this?

Sun Labs has a project called the Open Media Commons initiative, which revolves around digital rights management (DRM) systems, specifically the DReaM Project. Announced a year ago, DReaM described by Sun as "an open source community project developing a royalty-free digital rights management standard." And while it's primarily targeted at distributing arts and entertainment through electronic media, it's equally applicable to safeguarding the rights associated with any electronic document and, eventually, the rights associated with any packet of electronic data.

For example, one of the scenarios envisioned by the Open Media Commons group is DRM in healthcare. In an emergency room, DRM could provide benefits in the following ways:

* Patient records securely stored and managed.
* Physicians have individual network identity as well as changing "role-based" identity.
* Treating physician can "acquire" access rights to meet medical emergency needs.
* DRM system would track physician access and roles relative to patient records for audit.
* Hospital staff unable to acquire rights without sufficient identity and authentication.

Another scenario involves corporate data. Within an organization, DRM could provide benefits in the following ways:

* Corporate data (sales forecasts, financial data, customer records, new product info, etc) securely protected and managed.
* Employees have individual network identity as well as changing "role-based" identity.
* Employee can "acquire" access rights to meet changing job needs via remote management.
* Staff unable to acquire rights without sufficient identity and authentication.
* Rights easily withdrawn remotely with automatic revocation or network connectivity.

Dave Kearns is a consultant and editor of IdM, the Journal of Identity Management.