John "jbob" Bobowicz's Blog

August 2005 Archives

Open Media Commons turns the tables on DRM

In the past two months, we've seen Sun participate in The Apache Derby Project, an open source database written entirely in Java that IBM donated to Apache and now Jonathan recently announced Open Media Commons as an initiative that will develop royalty-free open standards for digital content.

No, you're not DReaMing

When Jonathan Schwartz kicked off the Progress Freedom Foundation Aspen Summit, last night with the Opening Remarks, I bet there were several people there that wished they were dreaming. This is because Jonathan shared his dream. He didn't just share any dream, he shared the Sun Labs project, "DReaM" (or DRM/ everywhere available) with the open source community under the OSI approved Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL).

He announced this last night as he unveiled the Open Media Commons initiative calling for an open source, royalty-free Internet standard to compensate rights-holders and stimulate innovation. Now THAT's the kind of dream I don't want to wake up from!

What's been contributed

Sun has launched Open Media Commons by donating the Sun Lab's DReaM project, licensed as open source with the CDDL License. It includes:

• DRM-OPERA: An interoperable DRM architecture implementing standardized interfaces and processes for the interoperability of DRM systems.
• Java Stream Assembly: Launch pad for Video Delivery Servers using the Java Stream Assembly (JSR-158) API
• Sun Streaming Server (SSS): Designed to serve standards compliant media (audio/video) streams over IP using open-standard protocols such as RTP and RTSP. SSS is compliant with 3GPP and ISMA specifications.

Who's rights are we managing?

I think this turns the tables on DRM is a couple of ways.

First, I think this is the first time I've heard anyone talk about the rights of the individual when they talk about Digital Rights Management. Jonathan describes "an age where individuals are creating and supplying the news as much as they are consuming it. Mobile phones play music and take pictures, high-quality video is delivered to almost any device on earth.." He rightly points out that in this day and age, it's not just big corporations that produce valuable digital content and therefore "we must not allow progress to be stifled by clumsy, self-defeating Internet tollgates in the form of a monolithic, closed digital rights management system."

Secondly, and specifically to DRM-OPERA - which is part of Sun's contribution to Open Media Commons, is the notion of user-based license provisioning as opposed to device-based licensing.

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