In his article ‘Digital Media Project Releases Second Spec‘ Bill Rosenblatt wrote:

The success of IDP-2 will, of course, depend on device vendors and service providers deciding to implement the spec. [...] In the typical course of events, service providers and device makers design services for consumers, and as part of that process, they obtain major content providers’ blessings to use their content in those services. [...] Will DMP’s series of specs inspire device makers, service providers, or content owners to implement services based on DMP’s innovative concept of interoperable DRM, will they remain merely interesting curiosities.

Bill Rosenblatt accurately describes how media standardization worked in the analogue space:

Market leaders (content providers, service providers and device manufacturers) designed services for consumers, wrote the technical specifications and implemented the standards. Then it was up to the content providers’ blessings to license their content to service providers to be distributed on a technical platform.

However, successful standardisation works somewhat differently in the digital space:

For DMP “Standardisation is the process by which individuals recognise the advantage of all doing certain things in an agreed way and codify that agreement”. Within the DMP project individuals codify the agreement on how they see the world of DRM – as an interoperable DRM system.

The DMP recognizes the fact that in the digital space individual people can play roles that had been exclusively reserved to the big players from the media industry: Users can be content providers, service providers, network providers, device manufacturers, if necessary all in one.

The Internet was standardized in this spirit (e.g. through RFCs, W3C standards) and interoperability between Internet devices and services is a result of it. The licenses of the underlying source code prevented that the Internet was “embraced and extended” by major device manufacturers or service providers.

Therefore I would like to rephrase Bill Rosenblatt’s quotes for the digital space: In the typical course of events Users design services for Users, and as part of that process, they obtain major Users’ blessings to use their content in those services.

The success of IDP-2 will, of course, depend on Users deciding to implement the spec.

Will Users implement services based on DMP’s innovative concept of interoperable DRM?

Of course I am an optimist…

Other people think that

giant telecoms have come up with a brilliant strategy to ensure they can create a partitioned-off, for-profit Internet, and they’re implementing it now.

My guess is that if Users have an incentive to provide interoperable DRM services, they will implement the IDP specs. One incentive could be a new digital media business model for a service (e.g. open content distribution). Another incentive could be a business model for building and selling new CE devices (e.g. open software download). Yet another incentive could be to bar “giant telecoms” from creating a partitioned-off Internet. We’ll see…

A critical advantage for the success of the DMP standards is that anyone can learn and understand the concepts of DRM e.g. by accessing the source code of the reference software (see dmp0681 for instructions).

It remains to be seen whether the reference software is compatible with FOSS licensing or if the Open Source developmemt of IDP is threatened by questionable claims of DRM patent owners.

DRM