TELECOMS & MOBILE
Digital rights for mobiles now in focus
03-02-2004
by
The Open Mobile Alliance has released the second version of its digital rights management system, but analysts say that its implementation will take time.
The OMA is a mobile industry body that is charged with establishing a standard to facilitate the sale of mobile content across different devices, geographies, service providers, operators and mobile networks.
This will allow consumers to download digital content such as music, video clips and games across mobile networks and will allow the operators and content providers to charge for it. Version 2 of DRM allows greater flexibility for the various business models that the content providers wish to use for digital content.
"DRM is meant to resolve a lot of rights management issues across vendors, such as what happens if I download and pay for a piece of digital content and then wish to forward it to other members of my family," said Dario Betti, analyst at Ovum, speaking to ElectricNews.net. "The tags required for a forwarding transaction like that have to be agreed across all of the industry participants."
But although the release of DRM Version 2.0 is a major advance for the industry, many issues still need to be resolved before it becomes the industry standard.
"This is not the final DRM specification, so if you're a software developer who wants to develop DRM-compliant products then you're still waiting," said Betti. "That specification won't be delivered until the middle of 2004."
Even once the standard for DRM is finalised, new DRM-compliant phones will have to be developed.
"Even by Christmas of 2005, the number of DRM-compliant phones on the market will be limited," Betti said. "So even though DRM is the best long-term bet, operators will have to come up with their own solution for the short-term."
Betti points to mmO2 as an example of a mobile operator that allows consumers to download music, but points out that it had to develop its own specification since the enhanced DRM standard had not yet been released.
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