Sun plans digital rights product for cell phones, desktops

Sun plans digital rights product for cell phones, desktops
SAN FRANCISCO — Sun Microsystems Inc. plans to roll out a digital rights management product this year that will span cell phones, desktops and smart cards. The technology is believed to be initially targeted at protecting content such as Java-based games and could be based on emerging work in the Open Multimedia Alliance.

"You will see us very shortly announce product plans for digital rights management," said Jonathan Schwartz, executive vice president of Sun's software group, speaking at the JavaOne conference here Tuesday (June 10).

Schwartz suggested the Sun approach could use smart cards or something similar to the SIM identity cards built into many European cellular phones today. The cards could also be used in smart card readers for desktop PCs to provide copy-protected content provided through service providers to PC users, he said.

Guy Laurence, chief executive officer for content services at cellular provider Vodafone (London), said the DRM could be based on enabling technology emerging from the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA), an ad hoc organization of cellular vendors led by Nokia. The group is expected to formally release a DRM technology that specifies how to encrypt content and different ways to send keys either with the protected content or separate from it.

A Nokia spokesman at JavaOne said the company already has several phones on the market that use the OMA's initial specification for "forward locking" content. The company will have at least one handset on the market this year that uses the full OMA DRM spec, he added.

An OMA spokeswoman said the group expects to detail its progress in several areas including DRM later this year but was not able to provide details about the DRM technology now."The DRM industry is overly muddled. Media companies want everything now, and technology companies want a single solution for everything, but no one size fits all here," said Sun's Schwartz.

In a presentation here, Tim Lindholm, chief technology officer for Sun's consumer mobile systems group, described a technique—now in use by Sprint's cellular division—that would allow a server to handle digital rights management for a cell phone. The cell phone could delete the protected content as needed to preserve limited memory on the handset and later download copies of the content as desired as long as the server acknowledged the user still had rights to that content.

Such a solution would play into Sun's strategy for using Java to drive demand for its servers.

"We are a $12 billion company. The way we get to be a $20 billion company is by getting more people to use Java devices. This drives demand for infrastructure and is absolutely tied to demand for new Sun servers," Schwartz said.

In an interview, Lindholm said it's still unclear what parts of the DRM technology for cell phones will be defined by OMA, Java standards and products from companies like Sun. "It's still a confused situation," he said.