The company said it will release DRM products compatible with OMA’s DRM 2.0, finalized over the summer, and the Open Digital Rights Language 1.1. RSA’s BSAFE, ClearTrust and Keon developer toolkits will support the specs.
The idea is to drive support for the standards in mobile and PC-based content services by using the concept of rights domains, where a consumer can have the right to use content across an array of devices under the same license.
RSA director of product management Michael Vergara said that companies such as Apple Inc, with its iTunes service, have demonstrated DRM can work in a consumer scenario, but that there are increasing interoperability frustrations.
We see this as a problem, Vergara said. We think the solution is to have a more standards-based approach, and decouple the technology from the business model.
In recent months, the DRM interoperability problem made headlines when RealNetworks Inc escalated its ongoing feud with Apple by reverse-engineering Apple’s proprietary Fairplay DRM to permit songs bought from RealNetworks to run on the iPod.
Of the other major players in the market, Microsoft and Time Warner Inc (owner of America Online) are seeking approval for their acquisition of ContentGuard Inc, which has control over a number of DRM technologies.
ContentGuard is home to eXtensible Rights Markup Language (XrML), which is already used by Microsoft, The MPEG standard Rights Expression Language (REL) is based on XrML, and is a comparable to ODRL.
