A group comprising technology, music and film industry firms has this week responded in an open letter to the points raised by Apple CEO Steve Jobs in an online essay entitled 'Thoughts on Music'.
In the essay, published last week, Mr Jobs angered the music and film industries by suggesting that Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies have not been effective in preventing the illegal copying of music and other copyrighted content, and could be done away with.
Discussing the possibilities of maintaining the status quo in terms of DRM, or of Apple licensing its Fairplay technology to competitors, the Apple boss dismissed the latter option, arguing that:
"Apple has concluded that if it licenses FairPlay to others, it can no longer guarantee to protect the music it licenses from the big four music companies. Perhaps this same conclusion contributed to Microsoft’s recent decision to switch their emphasis from an “open” model of licensing their DRM to others to a “closed” model of offering a proprietary music store, proprietary jukebox software and proprietary players."
He continued:
"The third alternative is to abolish DRMs entirely. Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music."
However, the Coral Consortium this week posted a letter to Steve Jobs on its website. The letter pointed out to Mr. Jobs that there is an additional alternative to the three described in his letter, namely DRM interoperability.
The Coral letter suggests to Mr. Jobs that the best way to achieve a truly consumer-friendly interoperable digital distribution marketplace that balances consumer needs with those of the content industry and in which DRM itself it virtually invisible to the consumer, is for Apple, Inc. and other key players to join with the existing members of the Coral Consortium in their efforts to deploy the DRM interoperability solution developed by the Coral participants.
The full text of the Coral Consortium letter is reproduced below:
"Dear Mr. Jobs,
The directors of Coral Consortium were pleased to hear about your interest in interoperability. We agree with you that this is a big problem for consumers. They should be able to acquire content from a wide variety of competitive service providers and play their purchased content on a range of devices and platforms from different manufacturers. This is an issue that is very important to our membership.
It would appear from your "Thoughts on Music" that you may not be familiar with our organization so we would like to take this opportunity to brief you.
We have been wrestling with the issues around interoperability for some years and have concluded that it is not so much a technology problem as a business problem. We have completed the development of a suite of technical specifications for interoperability and these can be downloaded from our website, http://www.coral-interop.org/. We think that your engineers will find it very straightforward to integrate this framework into your iTunes service. This technology would enable you to interoperate immediately with Microsoft based Janus devices and services, and with OMA (Open Mobile Alliance) based devices and services. Of course the secrets in Fairplay remain safe - adopting the Coral technology does not require you to share them with anyone else.
This does not just address music. The Coral Interoperability Framework works for video as well. We know that, as a major shareholder in a very successful film studio, it is important for you both to protect your film assets, and to provide for their widest possible distribution. Coral can enable that.
Finally, if you are worried about the content industry being comfortable with the Coral solution you should know that many parts of that industry have been involved in the development of these specifications. Though most of Coral's membership comes from technology companies and service providers, the members from the content community include:
We offer Apple, Inc. a warm invitation to join Coral's ranks and help provide interoperability and the increased choice that will bring to all of our customers.
Yours sincerely,
Jack Lacy
President, Coral Consortium
On behalf of the Coral Board of Directors."
Network Tweets
Network BlogsContent
provided by
|
Archive | Resources | Partners | Site Map | Links | Newsletter Archive | Contact | RSS Feeds | About | Syndication | Advertising & Marketing | Recruitment | Terms & Conditions | Privacy & Cookies
Copyright © 2012 - All Rights Reserved - Tax-News.com
IMPORTANT NOTICE: Tax-News.com has taken reasonable care in sourcing and presenting the information contained on this site, but accepts no responsibility for any financial or other loss or damage that may result from its use. In particular, users of the site are advised to take appropriate professional advice before committing themselves to involvement in offshore jurisdictions, offshore trusts or offshore investments.
Write a comment