MESSAGE
| DATE | 2003-09-16 |
| FROM | Ruben I Safir
|
| SUBJECT | Subject: [hangout] In IBM we trust
|
IBM is readying a digital rights management strategy for securing
content everywhere from Hollywood to Wall Street.
The initiative, called extensible Content Protection (xCP), involves
software that allows media companies to put controls on content
distributed to consumers' home networks. The initiative is aimed at
preventing illegal use of commercial media. Dick Anderson, the general
manger for IBM's Media and Entertainment group, will discuss the project
Thursday at a conference to be held at Harvard University's Berkman
Center for Internet and Society in Cambridge, Mass. IBM is expected to
announce its first entertainment industry xCP customer in about a month.
xCP includes encryption software that allows media providers to give
consumers the right to, for example, watch a movie on a DVD player and
any other xCP-compliant device on that consumer's home network. The
software will let media companies protect their intellectual property
and be simple enough for consumers to use, according to IBM.
Such safeguards will allow the media and entertainment industry to
develop viable business models for content distribution, which at this
point are lacking, said Steve Canepa, vice president of strategy for
IBM's media and entertainment industry.
"The ground we're trying to get to is to maybe take the focus off rights
specifications for control and limitation in what can be done with
content and to change the focus to self-enablement and a new user
experience," Canepa said.
Although high-profile battles waged by music and movie studios against
illicit Internet media downloads generate the most headlines, IBM sees a
parallel need for content protection in other industries.
An aerospace manufacturer, for example, would want to distribute
engineering plans to its partners electronically with strictly
controlled access rights. Also, regulations such as the Health Insurance
Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) dictate certain
data-protection procedures for medical patients' personal information.
However, because of inadequate digital rights management (DRM) software,
companies lose billions of dollars each year in intellectual property in
the form of stolen research or customer lists, said Stuart Sager,
program director for copy protection and DRM at IBM's software group.
"The need to protect content in the enterprise space is very real,"
Sager said. "We think that DRM is really going to become very
ubiquitous."
IBM will embed DRM capabilities across its software line. The company is
now testing a system to add DRM controls to its DB2 Content Manager
product and is targeting a final release of the add-on product at some
point in 2004.
The DRM features will allow a company to assign access rights to content
and track its usage. Customers can tap into the DRM feature, which is
written in Java, via Web services programming protocols, but they do not
have to change the code of existing applications, Sager said.
IBM will eventually embed its DRM software, called Copy Protection and
Enabling, across its entire middleware line, including WebSphere and
Tivoli products.
DRM is an important push for software giant Microsoft as well. DRM is a
key feature of its Office 2003 desktop application suite and an
important part of the company's ongoing security initiative. This week,
Microsoft revealed pricing details on its plan for assigning authoring
and viewing rights to documents for people using Microsoft Office and
Windows Server 2003.
IBM's approach to DRM is broader than Microsoft's, Sager said. IBM is
tracking standards for various content types, such as audio files,
images or video clips, and the DRM software in Content Manager will
support the various formats.
The DRM architecture also allows companies to reuse content in different
scenarios. For example, a company could sell an audio file for download
both to a mobile phone and to a home network using the xCP software.
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