Sun Microsystems

Q: Why is Sun qualified to lead this initiative?

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

Edens: Sun has a lot of experience in community building, in bringing communities together--the Liberty Alliance, the Java Community Process services, and the open standards we have contributed to.

We are kind of an interesting neutral player, because we don't compete with any of the big stakeholders. We supply equipment to the carriers. We supply equipment to the consumer electronics industry. We provide software stacks. We provide lots of equipment to the content owners and collectors. And of course, our gear goes into network equipment providers which then sell gear to the carriers.

So we are in an amazing position, because we actually serve all the parties and don't compete with them.

Q: What's the technical status of rights management software and hardware? How far along is this technology?

Edens: Just as the Internet grew from a set of basic principles and standards that are open and force anyone that wants to participate on the network to be interoperable, we must get to that same state with rights management and access authentication. And there's more to it than the conditional access or access indication parts--although those are certainly key elements.

We are also interested in audio and video codecs because that's another area where proprietary systems, tollgates, and intellectual property barriers are really killing innovation. The difficult task here is to create high-quality codecs which are also open source and royalty free. So one of the other parts of the Open Media Commons is to create those codecs.

Q: What makes it difficult?

Edens: There are three issues. One is how to leverage research and information theory to develop a set of technologies that could be royalty-free because they don't rely on someone else's intellectual property. The solution could be something as simple as the implementation of a standard. Or there might be a little more work to figure out how you engineer around a particular rights holder.

Another issue is getting codecs developed in a reference implementation that is high-quality enough to really prove they work. That's where an open source community has incredible value because you have more smart people working on the problem. Operating systems and applications that are open sourced tend to be more robust over time because you have more smart people looking at the code and finding problems.

The third issue is how do you provide a set of tools in the form of streaming players, streaming servers, and content encoders that really make the whole routine work?

Q: What role do you see digital rights management playing in the protection of intellectual property?

Edens: The fair use issue is both important and complicated. Intellectual property holders should have the right to determine what happens to their content, and a rights management system should enforce all the rights of different kinds of content creators.

So we certainly believe in content owners' rights to control their creations as they see fit. And consumers have the right that if those systems are onerous, they just don't have to buy them. So I think the whole fair usage issue gets sorted out by the market.

Society will be best served by interoperable and open standards-based systems for content distribution, access authentication, and access control. That's where we want to get to, and we hope the Open Media Commons is a step toward that future. If we can move the needle 20 degrees in the right direction, we will be happy.

Q: As a developer or content provider, how can I participate in the Open Media Commons?

Edens: There are many different communities with different levels of participation. To participate in other open source projects, check out the projects page, identify the project you have an interest in, and proceed based on the participation guidelines for that community.

As the Open Media Commons grows, the site will evolve to include more open source code and discussion forums. If you are a content owner or a collector, interact with the development community and describe the kind of things you would and would not like to see happen.

From Sun's perspective, the most important thing is that everyone is welcome to take part. We look forward to collaborating with you and hearing your ideas and suggestions.