Sun Microsystems

25.October.2005 - Glenn T. Edens, Senior Vice President, Communications, Media, & Entertainment, and Director of Sun Microsystems Laboratories, is leading Sun's efforts to develop and spread open digital rights management (DRM) technology. In this Q&A, Edens discusses the challenges surrounding DRM, and how Sun is helping to build a community to solve these problems.

Glenn T. Edens, Senior Vice President, Communications, Media, & Entertainment, and Director of Sun Microsystems Laboratories

Q: Tell us about the Open Media Commons and Project DReaM (.pdf).

Glenn Edens: Sun wanted to create an open source community to address a lot of technical and other issues related to rights management, digital content, and document distribution. We created the Open Media Commons basically as a framework for a set of open source projects.

Project DReaM started at Sun Labs as an open, end-to-end content-protection solution consistent with the Open Media Commons vision. Basically, it is an advanced model for DRM and content distribution systems.

There is a set of components that can be put together to form a complete DRM solution, or you can use the pieces individually. Project DReaM can also interoperate with other DRM systems. You could pick a Windows Media player and use a Java technology-based card as the authentication vehicle, for instance.

We have a page listing all the work related to Project DReaM, the Java Media product family, and other open source projects.

Q: What are the Project DreaM-related contributions?

Edens: DRM-OPERA is a DRM architecture with standardized interfaces and processes. It's independent of hardware, operating systems, and media formats. It enables user-based license provisions as opposed to the situation today where licenses are assigned to devices.

Q: Let's talk more about that distinction between user and device licenses in a minute. What are the other Project DreaM contributions?

Edens: The Java Stream Assembly is a launch pad for video delivery servers using the Java Stream Assembly API. Multiple vendor components can be plugged in using the Java Stream Assembly API for delivering broadcast, on-demand, and interactive TV streams.

The Sun Streaming Server (SSS) is designed to serve standards-compliant media streams over IP using open standards such as RTP (Real Time Transport Protocol) and RTSP (Real Time Streaming Protocol). The streams served by SSS are generally encoded using the MPEG-4 coders and decoders (codecs), but SSS is agnostic.

Q: What's driving these projects? Why is Sun involved?

Edens: Several factors. First, we began to get into a lot of conversations with our customers--carriers, content owners, developers, device manufacturers--asking if we had some ideas on the problems around rights management.

Sun also has a number of research projects that we felt would be well served by creating a community, and seeing if more people wanted to get involved in the technical aspects and the whole process of a community. That flows from Sun's history of working with standards and open source.

We also felt there wasn't a forum that allowed open technical and policy discussions and participation by carriers and content people. There is a lot of great work going on in closed industry consortiums, but we didn't see a place where all interested parties could get together.

Q: Going back to something you mentioned earlier, what are the issues and distinctions between the authentication of users and devices?

Edens: In most current scenarios, we are licensing machines instead of people, which doesn't make sense. When you buy a DVD or a CD, you are in effect entering into a contract between you as a person and the studio or the distributor of that content. It's not a contract between the studio and your DVD player. Of course, you can put DVDs in almost any player, so in a way, DVDs are already licensed to people, not to devices.

But if you look at something like MP3 players, in some models, your music is tied to a specific device with a single license or multiple licenses. This form of licensing has its problems. I lost two hardware-specific music licenses when I lost a laptop and when I replaced a computer and forgot to deauthorize a license.

If you had high speed Internet access available everywhere on the surface of the planet, you would never buy a CD or a DVD. Why would you own any media? You could much more conveniently and safely store both your personal content and your purchased content. At that point, the problem shifts from copy protection to access authentication. One of the things we are doing with Project DReaM is to base access authentication on an identity model. It leverages Sun's identity products, which authenticate users.

Q: So users can access that content from all sorts of devices.

Edens: Exactly. As technology continues to improve, what becomes more important is designing devices that do specific things, for specific sets of users. Some people might want the proverbial Swiss Army Knife of a digital media device--a cell phone with a camera and an MP3 player and a Web browser and an e-mail terminal and eight other things. But many others want unique devices that do unique things.

Design and user interface and experience and packaging and how a service is delivered are becoming far more important than the issues of what can you cram in a cell phone and how many keys can it have and how big should the display be to keep it inexpensive.

Glenn Eden discusses the evolution of digital rights management and why Sun is uniquely qualified to spearhead related technology development and community building.