Nokia gives in to DRM royalties
You may have wondered just what has been the problem with handset companies like Nokia getting their hands on quality music and video for their handsets and for portals such as Nokia Ovi. If Apple can do it for the iPhone, why can't other handset companies, or operators like Vodafone, follow suit? They seem to be managing with music, but not quite so well with video.
One of the issues is almost invariably digital rights management (DRM) software, something that consumers have come to hate, because it usually prevents them doing what they want with the content they have paid for. Studios won't release legal TV and film content, and record labels won't release music, unless a company like Nokia can complete a security audit, showing that it is looking after the content properly and that the device won't be another place for content to leak onto the internet (even though most of it has already leaked there, but that's content owners for you).
But just because the OMA didn't actually consult the technology companies which drove DRM techniques, didn't mean it could go ahead and copy these firms' technologies, and a patent pool was set up, requesting royalties for all of the relevant technologies. At the front of the pack was Intertrust, a 30-person US company that held Microsoft in a legal stand-off and got $440m in settlement after a US court hearing.
The Microsoft settlement meant Microsoft DRM technology was more or less covered for Windows, though not owned by Microsoft, and this in turn made Windows Media DRM one of the trusted systems for Hollywood and the record labels, partly because it is not trivial to break into and partly because most people perceive it as free, at least on the PC. This started to overshadow OMA, and Nokia decided to use the next generation of the technology, called PlayReady, on its Ovi portal and even helped to write a little of it for the Symbian operating system.
By comparison, OMA DRM has withered on the vine - until perhaps last week, when Nokia signed a deal with Intertrust. It turns out that Nokia needs these rights even to implement PlayReady and a legal suit would have ensued if it hadn't agreed to the licensing deal. What that deal now gives Nokia is the right to produce rock solid DRM, but also the rights to a peculiar set of patents, which make it easy for one person to tie their phone to another phone or PC as a group, and make content copies with impunity. This problem has been slowing down the entire issue of entertainment on the handset, and whether or not services can be launched that allow any level of copying to your friends and family. The iPhone and the iPod solved this, but only because everything in the iPhone world is defined by Apple. In a world of multiple phone designs and layer upon layer of multimedia software, Apple is a only beginner and its FairPlay DRM is lightweight and easy to break.
Nokia has been the big hold-out in all of this, with Samsung still to join in, but LG and Motorola are already Intertrust licensees, as is Vodafone. If the rest of the major European operators - Telefonica, T-Mobile, Orange and Telenor - cave in, and if Samsung joins the party, pretty soon there is the possibility of far more free flowing content on both devices and on-deck portals, and a willingness on the part of Hollywood to open up its Pandora's box of content. So although this is deal you won't read about in many places, it is quietly oiling the wheels of getting content onto the handset in a meaningful and usable way.
