Rights-based DRM

Hi, my name is Kevin Collins. I'm the VP of Engineering at Navio Systems and today I'm going to talk about rights based DRM. DRM is a technology that is used heavily in the industry today to protect content that is going into the consumer's hands. Publishers use DRM technology to protect that content and have secure distribution over to the consumers.

Consumers unknowingly have to rely on this technology and use it within the software that they're using. If they go to Apple and iTunes, they're actually downloading DRM content. The publisher needs to deal with all of these technologies and it's very difficult to control because there's many different video formats, music formats and mobile content that they have to deal with. So if you've got music and it's on the Apple iTunes store, they have to worry about Fair Play Technology. If they're distributing video using Microsoft Technology they have to worry about that. And anything with mobile, they have to worry about OMA.

Now, the problem from a publisher's perspective is that they're now making business decisions on the technologies that are used to encode and protect this content. It's also very difficult to track and control.

A consumer doesn't fair any better. The consumer must deal with this technology as well. And the consumer has to deal with it not only from the content perspective but they also have to deal with it because they're dealing with different devices. Consumers have iPods for music and video content. They will have laptops. They will have phones and Sony Playstations and every one of those pieces of content will have different software and codecs. It's a very complex world for the publisher and a very complex world for the consumer to deal with.

Rights based DRM is a service approach that takes this complexity away. It makes it much simpler for the publisher and the consumer to deal directly with each other. It is a service approach that abstracts the complexity of the technology that's used for music, video, ringtone and other mobile content distribution away from both parties. So the service now deals with the underlying technology and the publisher deals with the consumer on equal terms.

Now, what the publisher is going to do to make this life easy for the consumer is they're going to sell content to the consumer. And instead of just selling the encoded file content, they're going to sell the consumer rights to the content. And those rights are simple representations of the legal right that the consumer has to the content and the consumer then deals directly with the service in order to get the content. When they get that content it then comes down in the format suitable for their device. And they don't have to worry about the choices. They simply go to the service, say I've got the rights to the content and they get it on the device that they want.

So with the service approach to rights based DRM, the consumer doesn't need to deal with this. The publisher also doesn't need to deal with this. All of these are handled by the service. It's an abstraction layer. The publisher has their content here, the service deals with all the complexity and the underlying technology, and all of this goes away.