The Open Mobile Alliance have officially published version 2 of their DRM standard. Supported by Nokia and Arpa amongst others, the standard incorporates the Open Digital Rights Language.
The standards are open source and available without any obligations or licensing requirements. Permissions and restrictions are as simple as possible, being limited to play, display, execute, print and export for Permissions, and count, timed-count, datetime, interval, accumulated, individual and system for Restrictions. Combined, these mean that content can be protect from unauthorised sharing, or viewed only a fixed number of times.
OMA began working on the standard in 2001 in response to market demand and has steadily upgraded the specification as networks, content and end-users have become more sophisticated.
The Open Mobile Alliance
Published by
Fraser Lovatt
Fraser Lovatt has spent the last fifteen years working in publishing, TV and the Internet in various capacities, and believes that they will be seperate platforms for at least a while yet. His main interests at the moment are exploring where Linux is taking home entertainment and how technology is conferring technical skills on more and more people.
Fraser Lovatt was born in the same year that 2001: A Space Odyssey was delighting and confusing people in the cinemas, and developed a lifelong love of technology as soon as he realised that things could be taken apart, sometimes put back together again, but mostly left in bits or made into something the original designer hadn't quite planned upon.
At school he was definitely in the ZX Spectrum/Magpie/BMX camp, rather than the BBC Micro/Blue Peter/well-behaved group. This is all deeply ironic as he later went on to spend nine years working at the BBC.
After a few years of working as a bookseller in Scotland, ("Back when it was actually a skilled profession" he'll tell anyone still listening), he moved to England for reasons he can't quite explain adequately to himself. After a couple of publishing jobs punctuated by sporadic bursts of travelling and photography came the aforementioned nine years at the BBC where he specialised in internet technologies and video.
These days his primary interests are Java, Linux, videogames and pies - and if they're not candidates for convergence, then what is?
View all posts by Fraser Lovatt