Four of the world’s biggest consumer electronics companies are partnering to develop a digital rights management (DRM) standard to deter piracy and illegal copying of music and video.
Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Royal Philips Electronics, Samsung Electronics Co. and Sony Corp. formed the Marlin Joint Development Association, which aims to develop a standard that will let manufacturers build devices that can share copy-protected material. The companies hope to replace the current assortment of electronic locks that allow digital content to be used only on a single manufacturer’s devices.
Philips and Sony are already working on a DRM standard, dubbed Coral, with HP and Fox Studios. The proposed Marlin standard will be fully compatible with Coral.
Intertrust Technologies, a California-based software developer that owns many of the crucial patents for digital anti-piracy protection, will provide much of the technology for the effort.
“Convergence across consumer Internet, broadcast and mobile devices and services during the past few years has been constrained because of often-conflicting proprietary DRM technologies and differing standards for each distribution mode, such as proprietary methods of music distribution to hard disk music players form the Internet,” Intertrust said in a prepared statement.
The technology can be used in any device that accesses content via the Internet or broadcast or mobile-phone networks. A final version of the Marlin standard is due this summer.
