Six Big Guns Point At Piracy Lock Compatibilty Problems
FMQB and the Los Angeles Times report that “six of the world’s largest entertainment and technology companies have agreed to take on the problem of anti-piracy locks that are not compatible. According to a Los Angeles Times article, Sony Corp., Samsung Electronics, Royal Phillips Electronics, Matsushita Electric Industrial, Hewlett-Packard and News Corp.’s 20th Century Fox Film Corp. are all charter members of the “Coral Consortium,” which will be announced today. The companies have agreed to develop a framework for digital rights management that will work with a variety of devices and services. Many analysts have said the compatibility problem is what has held back the digital download movement from growing even more.
The goal of the alliance is to get consumers past the frustrating situation that prevents songs that were downloaded from iTunes from being played on a portable music device made by Dell, for example. The Coral Consortium does not yet have a solution to the problem, only a commitment to develop one in the next nine months, says the LA Times. Leading digital download sellers Apple, Microsoft and RealNetworks are not in the consortium.
If Coral succeeds, the entertainment industry won’t have to settle on a single anti-piracy technology, said Talal Shamoon, chief executive of Intertrust Technologies Corp. Instead, songs and videos would move securely from device to device around a home or personal network as long as the piracy locks work together automatically.”
Strangely on the same day Consortium founder Sony Music also announced that it is “giving up on the built-in copy-protection software that came installed on all its CDs, after spending two years promoting it. The CDs allowed the buyer to copy the music for free onto their own computer, but charged a fee via the Internet if it was copied again.
According to the Associated Press and FMQB, Sony is abandoning the software because the company says it has successfully gotten out its message about the illegality of file-sharing. A spokesperson for the company told the AP that Sony Music has learned only a small percentage of the population is now illegally copying CDs.
Sony is most likely altering its strategy as a result of the popularity of portable digital music players, such as the iPod. Sony will soon release their own portable audio player, starting in Europe, which will be compatible with any audio file format. Sony also has its own online music store, Sony Connect, which launched in May. “
