Java Industry News

"We fundamentally believe that a federated DRM solution must be built by the community, for the community," Sun's President & COO Jonathan Schwartz (pictured) told the Progress and Freedom Foundation Aspen Summit last week.

Schwartz was in Aspen to unveil the Open Media Commons initiative, an open-source community project developing a royalty-free digital rights management standard.

To further this goal, he called for immediate cross-industry collaboration in developing an open, safe and business-friendly approach to the free creation, duplication and distribution of digital content:

"I urge those across the industry, be they in front of a development workstation or in an executive suite or walking the halls of Congress, to get involved in the debate before the goals of a few impede the possibility of long-term, sustained economic growth for everyone. We must find an open path forward, it's in the economic self-interest of every one of us. And, after all, widespread and shared economic growth makes all progress possible."

"We are entering the Participation Age," Schwartz continued, "an age where individuals are creating and supplying the news as much as they are consuming it. Mobile phones play music and take pictures, high-quality video is delivered to almost any device on earth, and legitimate global P2P networks are being created that will transform the way we live. The demand for new network services is exploding. Incredible economic value is waiting to be tapped, but we must not allow progress to be stifled by clumsy, self-defeating Internet tollgates in the form of a monolithic, closed digital rights management system."

Schwartz went on:

"The issue at hand is fair compensation without loss of fair use. The Open Media Commons is committed to creating an open network growth engine, all the while continuing to protect intellectual property in a manner that respects customer privacy, honors honest uses of media, and encourages participation and innovation."

Laying the foundation for the Open Media Commons initiative, Sun will immediately share the entirety of its internal Sun Labs program "Project DReaM" (for "DRM/everywhere available") with the community under the OSI-approved Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL).

Sun Labs Project DReaM consists of 3 components:

• DRM-OPERA: An interoperable DRM architecture implementing standardized interfaces and processes for the interoperability of DRM systems. The DRM-OPERA architecture is independent of specific hardware and operating systems, and is not restricted to specific media formats. It enables user-based license provision as opposed to today's situation where licenses are assigned to devices.
• Java Stream Assembly: Launch pad for Video Delivery Servers using the Java Stream Assembly (JSR-158) API which reduces the complexity in building and managing video streams to be delivered over access networks. Multiple vendor components can be plugged in using the Java Stream Assembly API for delivering broadcast, on-demand, and interactive TV streams.
• Sun Streaming Server (SSS): Designed to serve standards compliant media (audio/video) streams over IP using open-standard protocols such as RTP and RTSP. SSS is compliant with 3GPP and ISMA specifications. While the server is agnostic to the format of the media, the streams served by SSS are generally encoded using the MPEG-4 codecs. SSS supports MPEG-4 and QuickTime out of the box.

Sun says it plans "to continue sharing technologies with the community over time" and will also contribute its significant community leadership experience in the area of identity management, gained from its participation in the Liberty Alliance - a group of more than 150 global organizations united to address the technical, business and policy challenges around identity and identity-based Web services.

The Electronic Freedom Foundation, in the meantime, is saying that Sun's Open Media Commons "is more like a gated community" and is warning consumers that DRM, in its view, "is incompatible with fair use."

More information on the Open Media Commons can be found at www.OpenMediaCommons.org.