LACK OF DRM STANDARDS IMPEDING BROADBAND DEMAND

Lack of broadband standards and such things as “plug-and- play” equipment is delaying move toward broadband, according to surveys unveiled Mon. at digital rights management (DRM) conference sponsored by U.S. Commerce Dept. But speakers repeatedly emphasized they didn’t want govt. intervention in DRM. While Bush Administration isn’t yet “frustrated to the point of legislation” about lag in broadband deployment, it’s looking at ways to “generate some heat and maybe a little light” on issue, Commerce Undersecy. Phillip Bond said. Challenge is that despite its availability to 85% of U.S. homes, only about 10% have signed up, Asst. Secy. Bruce Mehlman said.

Surveys point to several problems, Mehlman said: (1) Cost. (2) Belief among many that broadband is solely office service. (3) Lack of consumer dissatisfaction with current services. (4) Absence of killer content. Govt. can be leader in broadband use by educating public about its value and launching e-govt. services, Mehlman said, but most important work must be done by technologists, engineers and entrepreneurs. Unlocking content is key, he said.

One message was clear: By and large, neither content nor technology community wants govt. intervention in creating technical standards for DRM. Govt. can provide bully pulpit preaching against evils of privacy, benchmark progress of private sector solutions, get stakeholders talking, foster spread of content on Internet through e-govt. initiatives and provide testbeds on new technologies, participants said. But marketplace must be free to craft technical standards for content protection, most said.

Responding to question about what technological hurdles to online content protection remained, MPAA Pres. Jack Valenti said market must get together and decide what DRM standards were, as it did with DVDs. In Sept., Valenti said, he met with representatives of digital world to try to create technical platform from which many different applications could launch. “Unhappily,” he said, several companies refused to meet, perhaps out of fear of govt. intervention. Only alternative to private- side solution, Valenti said, is Congress.

Valenti pressed several industry representatives to set deadline for developing DRM standards, saying without time limit nothing would get done. It won’t work and industry won’t agree to it, Information Technology Information Council Pres. Rhett Dawson said. Standards must stand or fall on their technical merits, not because there’s noose around industry’s neck, he said. It’s better to have good decision in marketplace at right time than bad decision that will frustrate consumers, Dawson said. Standard-setting must work through all stakeholders’ interests, he said, including movie studios, consumer electronics makers and others. If Congress had passed DVD standards legislation in 1996, he said, it would have had debilitating effect on marketplace. Rep. Tauzin (R-La.) and Sen. Hollings (D- S.C.) “do believe in deadlines,” Valenti countered, and their trumps carrier heavier weight than “yours and mine.” Valenti stressed, however, that he didn’t want Congress to intervene.

If issue can be boiled down to small subset of content protection systems as trampoline for other applications, industry could agree that it isn’t basis for competition, said David Cheriton, Cisco Technical Leader, Gigabit Switching Group Engineering. Brendan Traw, Intel dir.-content protection technology, said there was range of technologies needed to protect content going to home, but more was required to protect content moving from home to different devices. Microsoft Dir.- Technology Policy Andrew Moss said it was important to look at telecommuting and other uses in addition to movies. It’s not so much that people say, “I gotta watch a movie,” as it is “I want to do something useful.” Focus, he said, should be on interoperability of technologies, not creating static system.

How good is good enough content protection? Mehlman asked. Dawson said it depended on application. He said that in academic community preventing online piracy wasn’t as important as knowing who registered and read materials, while at other end, govt. wanted to keep classified materials as hacker-proof as possible. Valenti said nothing is 100% hacker-proof, but most people aren’t hackers if given interesting content at reasonable price. Dawson said way to contain breaches is to build system with no “master key” but that allows only localized intrusions. System must include constant monitoring to find breaches of digital devices, watermarking or some other form of tracking to find hackers, he said.

Software makers don’t accept the notion that any level of piracy is acceptable, Business Software Alliance Pres. Robert Holleyman said. However, he said, they also recognize that no technology is foolproof and each required widespread consumer acceptance. People have to begin thinking about “risk management” versus “ultimate security,” said Victor McCrary, chief, National Institute of Standards & Technology convergent information systems div., information technology lab. He said DRM must be usable or consumers will reject it.

There are 350 million players who distribute content in protected form, Moss said. That shows that DRM technology is working, he said. “Good enough” is relative term, he said, that means technology has been available for several years and there haven’t been any violations that couldn’t be fixed in reasonable period of time.

Are DRM technologies adequate to protect all online content or only content that moves from single point to another point? Mehlman asked. Michael Miron of ContentGuard said business models must be designed to meet consumer demand, whether that meant identifying every device consumer is using or letting user download content at home and then send it to friends for limited use. That model hasn’t been built yet because no one knows what standards to build it to, he said.

For content creators, in many cases, technology isn’t here, said McCrary. Problem is, he said, that each industry wants to use its own encapsulation. McCrary said what was needed was “recombinant multimedia,” where users could mesh various technologies. Content owners are holding back, however, until DRM technologies work together, he said. Cheriton said that from technical standpoint “movies are the big enchilada. Consumers want to watch them on consumer electronic (CE) equipment, he said, but cost and interoperability are issue. We haven’t had network-connected CE devices before, he said. Peter Fannon, vp- technology policy & regulatory affairs, Panasonic, said that in CE world, consumer confidence “is what you live and die by.” People have to know what a device is and what it does for them, but it takes time for them to learn. No one, he said, wants to wait for the youngest one or 2 generations to learn about new digital technologies.