A US-based film and music technology firm said yesterday it had grouped together all the patents needed to protect digital film and music on mobile phones against piracy, the first time digital rights have been pooled.
MPEG LA, which already offers all essential patents for the international digital video compression standard known as MPEG-2, said five companies had pooled essential anti-piracy patents for a standard set by the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA), an organisation of handset makers and mobile telecoms operators.
Mobile phone makers which implement the technology into their handsets can protect songs, software and other digital content against forwarding, or they can allow consumers to use or copy the material under certain conditions.
The standard is expected to promote the availability of digital content for mobile phones. Music, film and software companies have been reluctant to make their catalogues available for mobile phone consumption.
The pooling of the anti-piracy and content control technology will make it easier for handset makers and mobile operators to start using the technology, because they can buy the rights to all essential patents in one place, MPEG LA said.
"They will know what the price is, so there is no uncertainty when they make their business plans," said MPEG LA's vice-president for licensing, Mr Larry Horn.
Handset makers will pay $1 to include OMA's Digital Rights Management (DRM) 1.0 standard into a mobile phone. Content owners which want to protect their material with OMA DRM, will pay royalties representing 1 per cent of the consumer selling price of their service. The five companies are InterTrust and ContentGuard, two small but powerful DRM companies, plus electronics giants Sony and Matsushita Electric Industrial from Japan, and Philips Electronics.
The pooling should also make clear that everyone who uses OMA's DRM needs to pay royalties. ContentGuard said last October that OMA had not informed its members properly and that many handset makers thought the anti-piracy standard was free.
The mobile phone industry has already specified the next version of anti-piracy software, version 2.0, and MPEG LA hopes to have pooled the patents for this by the middle of this year. "OMA 1.0 has set a marker," Mr Horn said, adding new names will probably be added to the list of patent holders, although he would not identify them. - (Reuters)
