It goes without saying that digitally distributed media has broad consumer appeal. Napster proved that. What began as a one-man hobby in a college dorm room soon erupted into an Internet phenomenon rivalling even Netscape's early hype. Following on the heels of Napster's MP3 file sharing success, competing P2P applications like Gnutella, Audio Galaxy, and Morpheus emerged. These applications opened up the possibility of digital distribution for the full range of media formats, including audio, video, still images, e-books, and more.
Then came the hard part. For many in the media industry, the legal morass Napster found itself in proved one thing: before online digital distribution could become a viable business model, the delivery method needed to be tied to technologies that programmatically enforce the rights of content creators and publishers. The race to provide those technologies reached its peak in the year 2000, by which time more than 100 companies had announced products and services for the burgeoning digital rights management (DRM) market.
Unfortunately, these multiple simultaneous efforts led the industry to an impasse. None of the various competing and conflicting DRM schemes is a clear winner, and the inevitability of consolidation looms overhead. Given this volatile environment, potential customers have been hesitant to hitch their fortunes to any one approach. Thus, the adoption rate of DRM technologies has remained slow. For digital distribution to succeed, there must be broad interoperability between the different protection, commerce, and media management systems.
The Total Package
Monolithic DRM platforms offer one kind of interoperability. If your media delivery and rights management system is an end-to-end solution provided by a single vendor, you can be reasonably certain that all of the components will work well together. Perhaps the best example of this approach is Microsoft Windows Media Rights Manager (WMRM). With this suite, Microsoft provides tools for the entire life cycle of rights-protected media, from packaging and distribution to license management, all the way to playback on the client side.
Predictably, OS platform independence is the first casualty of Microsoft's design. A Microsoft product brochure describes WMRM as "A Win/Win for Everyone." This description is accurate, if ironic. While the initial release supported the Mac OS and several third-party media player applications, with version 7.1 Microsoft scaled back WMRM's scope to make it a truly "Win/Win" solution: Windows on the client, and Windows on the server. Other than Microsoft's own Windows Media Player, only the Windows version of MusicMatch Jukebox is cited as supporting the new WMRM playback architecture.
This tactic is in keeping with Microsoft's Windows platform strategy as a whole, but it also offers significant technical advantages. Most notably, it lets Microsoft build a foundation for its DRM capabilities by introducing a security layer at the OS level—an idea it recently patented (see the "Rights: Patent Pending" sidebar for more information). This foundation was at least partially delivered with Windows XP. However, even Microsoft is hesitant to claim it as a bulletproof measure. "We don't believe any possible DRM system is actually invulnerable," says David Caulton, product manager for the Microsoft Windows digital media division.
Likewise, most content publishers think the idea of a single, universal OS and media player application is unrealistic, if not downright ludicrous. The Association of American Publishers was unequivocal in its position paper on DRM for e-books, which was published in November 2000. Today's reality, the association asserted, is that digital media providers must be prepared to deliver content using as many media formats and DRM architectures as necessary to reach the broadest possible audience.
The paper goes on to dismiss the touted benefits of end-to-end DRM solutions like Microsoft's as "hyperbole," insisting that development of industry standards is the only true road to DRM interoperability in the e-book arena. Perhaps it's no surprise then that Microsoft chose the e-book marketplace as the testing ground for its departure from WMRM's monolithic DRM architecture with the release of Microsoft Digital Asset Server (DAS) in late 2000. The key to this new, standards-based approach wasn't a Microsoft product, however. Rather, it was a little-known XML-based rights expression language called XrML.
