Shape DRM Debate Around Business, Not Morals, CEA’s Petricone Says

SANTA MONICA, Calif. -- The discussion about digital rights management (DRM) needs to move away from moralistic judgments, said CEA Senior Vice President Michael Petricone said at Digital Hollywood. The issue is giving consumers what they want or risk them going to a free pirate site, he said. “This is the world we're going to live in for a long time -- we're going to compete for free. The way you do it is provide consumers with something reliable and more attractive than the darknet offering that will always be around. And DRM is hindering what the consumer wants to do so it is impeding competition."

Patrick Ross, executive director of the Copyright Alliance, disagreed that DRM as a security device is a technological dinosaur. “You also have to recognize every time a content owner lets a consumer play content on multiple devices they are sacrificing a constitutional right,” he said. “The DRM system was broken years ago but still works fine for most consumers."

"What’s missing is an agreed-to standard with relation to the metadata because every content provider sets their own standards,” said Michael Alexander of IBM Global. “What we find is we've lost the government standards. There was an ISO standard MPEG21 that seemed to have the coverage of not only music and video content but all types including games and applications for billing and rights. So now we're dealing with consortiums like DECE."

Standards like ISO were not efficient and it could take a decade to get one agreed upon, so relying on the private sector is preferable, said Mark Isherwood, co-founder or Rightscom. “As a general gambit over the last eight or nine months, things have fundamentally changed with portability so the issue of meta data description is going to be vita,” he said. Isherwood expressed concern that the debate over DRM centered on its security function. “Technical protection level is just as important a part as is a policy layer and an interoperability part,” he said. “The content industry was used to an analog world -- a low volume, high transaction business. Within the last five years it’s become a high volume, low transaction business. They are scrambling to adapt and it affects everyone around them."

Content providers have to accept responsibility for not investing in technology they knew was coming, Isherwood said. “Now it’s everyone’s problem -- CE, distributors -- and they have to get involved whether they like it or not. But they cannot make it work unless the policy layer is intact.” The signs are encouraging, Isherwood said. “Things tended to be done on a content-by-content basis, but now a much broader approach is being taken because nobody wants 27 different standards within the entertainment realm. For the first time this is coming to the attention to CFOs and CEOs and this is fundamental to making the sums add up because the margins on digital content are so small.”