DECE settles on UltraViolet media DRM, still lacks Apple
updated 08:30 am EDT, Tue July 20, 2010
DECE gets closer to launch with name, new partners
The Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem edged closer to an actual launch today by settling on a new name for its copy protection scheme, UltraViolet (UV), and unveiling new partners. In addition roughly 60 major electronics, content and software firms, the Internet media locker standard now has support from Korea's LG as well as the ARM chip designer Marvell and LOVEFiLM. The group now expects UV to enter the test phase later in the year.
The technology is designed to ease cross-portability of media across different devices while still giving the content providers security against easy piracy. With UV, a customer can buy or rent content such as a movie and have access to it just by signing into a digital rights locker that, if necessary, lets the owner download the content again.
Notably absent from the group are Apple and Disney. The studio is developing its own equivalent, Keychest, and may have had support from Apple for its development. Apple chief Steve Jobs sits on Disney's Board of Directors and is the company's largest individual shareholder.
In recent years, Apple has insisted that it be in control of most technology that determines its fate and has been extremely resistant to having to use copy protection it doesn't own. It prefers to go without copy protection altogether rather than use a standard like UV, which would force it to wait on agreements with dozens of other firms to act on changes. Apple is rumored to have its own cloud-based iTunes movie service in development and would likely use it to drive customers to the upcoming Apple TV as well as the iPad and other video-friendly Apple mobile devices.
Fresh-Faced Recruit
Joined: Apr 1999
Meh
The studios apparently have still not learned their lesson, and they're still trying to "sell" downloaded movies with DRM on them. DRM works for rentals, and this might even find some success for such, but when I'm buying content, I expect it to work on any device I want to play it on for all eternity. This does not give me such a capability, and so it's not even a consideration. Instead, I'll keep buying shiny discs whose copy protection has been completely defeated, and ripping them to standard video formats that play everywhere.
If these studios were smart, they'd sell standard format video and rent the DRM'd stuff, simply so there is less justification for people to break the DRM, since it would only be useful to steal rented content. Instead, they're pushing people to crack these DRM schemes to get access to the content they bought. So in the end, either this DRM system gets cracked wide open and it's completely ineffective (the most likely outcome in any case), or it stays secure and fades into obscurity, eventually shutting down and taking everyone's purchased media down with it, like every other failed digital download DRM system before it.