DRM On Your Phone - Guilty Until Proven Innocent

[Ewan]

It's a tough world out there for mobile phone users, carriers, handset vendors and OS (writes John Lettice at The Register). Lettice has a very lengthy piece on Digital Rights Management, looking at the OMA spec that is carried by Symbian.

[evobit]

Great article, and interesting times ahead indeed. Domi's become quite famous hasn't he

Nokia really need to jump onboard the ship with stereo symbian phones now that both sendo and siemens are out there, and their 6230 is not a bad little unit.

[GhostDog]

Yes,great article but stereo phones are not the point here.Its the stew the operators and manufacturers are cooking for us,the end users.

Why should i care if they can't make money selling cheap MIDI ringtones and wallpapers!??I pay good money every month for using their services which are overpriced anyway.Every phone i bought so far was SIM Free,i paid good money for it.Why should it be crippled by some silly forward lock?

The tittle says it all Guilty Until Proven Innocent.The only problem is you can't be proven innocent.OMA DRM(in its current state)has no way telling whether the content you are trying to share is copyrighted or not so any files with extensions as JPG,SIS,MID etc etc are banned.True,this can be bypassed by couple of keypressess using Domi's FExplorer but what about NON Symbian phones,IE: Nokia Series 40.Do you know that the only item you can share with Series 40 device is a VCard?

It smells Palladium to me.

[evobit]

I fully agree, I made the point about the 6230/stereo because it's a great example of DRM. More than likely the reason we don't have a symbian phone from Nokia with the 6230's features is because they are aware the open nature of the symbian os allows users to bypass DRM.

[N/A]

I still don't see the connection of stereo sound to DRM.

Anyway, of Nokia Series 60 phones the N-Gage has stereo sound now. The 6260 will, too.

And the Siemens SX and Sendo X are also Series 60 phones with stereo sound.

[evobit]

I beg to differ with you Ghostdog. Stereo phones are a big point here.
Images/midi files etc... who cares. Phone wallpaper is so cheap it's not worth the hassle, as are midi files. Larger images/photos, sure a few people in the world maybe interested in sharing them with a phone, but the size of the screen makes it nearly pointless. Over here Vodafone disabled the IR on the GX10 in an effort to prevent people getting wallpaper etc fron anywhere except vfLive. I must have lost them at least 100 sales of those phones by advising people not to buy them hehe.

Stopping music sharing (mp3 etc) is one of the driving forces behind DRM.
You can't share music from your 6230, even though it's a great device for playing music.
You can however share music from a symbian phone, but using a current nokia symbian there's no point (I could be wrong but I heard the n-gage mp3 player only plays mono through the headphones?) as the quality is rubbish - big part of which is lack of stereo output.
Nokia start selling phones capable of great playback and sharing ability... woah.. there's the market leader indirectly promoting music sharing. I'm sure that's something they've been trying to avoid until this point.

Sure, me and the other 2 people in the country with an SX1/X can share music... so it's hardly a problem for smaller manufacturers especially given that only one of the 2 other people in the country know how to circumvent the built in DRM with fexplorer.

It will be interesting to see what the 6260 has wrt DRM.

[GhostDog]

but using a current nokia symbian there's no point (I could be wrong but I heard the n-gage mp3 player only plays mono through the headphones?)

Nope,it plays good quality stereo.

evobit,you are missing the big picture here,its not about stereo phones,its about phones,in general

[evobit]

Originally Posted by GhostDog

its not about stereo phones,its about phones,in general

I'm not missing the big picture, rather focussing on the practical affect this will have on the actual users of the phones. Up until now (now being the introduction of high quality music playback capable handsets) DRM has still been in effect but hardly noticed by the end users.

Music is what will bring the DRM issue with cellphones to the forefront from the eyes of the consumer.

Hi There,

I have to say few words because there are some guys there talking absolutely bullshit! The block-lists found in the phones that ban certain content-types not to be moved away from the phone are not part of OMA DRM specification. They are set by the mobile phone manufacturers or the OS providers. Downside of this is that block lists block all the content, not just copyrighted.

OMA DRM Forward Lock on the other hand provides a mechanism for blocking certain content by marking content copyrighted. Thus instead of making block-lists that ban for example all the bitmap formats (JPG, GIF WBMP and so on), with OMA DRM Forward Lock content providers are able to state that the picture bought from a site is copyrighted content and thus only that picture can not be transferred from phone to another device.

So do not make assumptions like: "OMA DRM(in its current state)has no way telling whether the content you are trying to share is copyrighted or not so any files with extensions as JPG,SIS,MID etc etc are banned".

And it is not about the phones only, it is about the whole media industry and consumer electronics. Although OMA is creating the DRM systems, DLNA (http://www.dlna.org/) is the place where the action is

Have a nice summer...

[GhostDog]

I'm not making any assumptions.Most of the Series 40 devices and a few Series 60 devices(3650,3660,6600) and the Series 90 Nokia 7700 have only partial DRM support in the form of content supported formward lock i described earlier.

Originally Posted by GhostDog

I'm not making any assumptions.Most of the Series 40 devices and a few Series 60 devices(3650,3660,6600) and the Series 90 Nokia 7700 have only partial DRM support in the form of content supported formward lock i described earlier.

According to Nokia's paper (DRM Developer's Guide for Nokia Devices v2.0):

"Nokia is currently supporting a forward-lock solution called the Nokia Closed Content List (CCL) in all devices. With the introduction of OMA DRM technology, the existing solution will be modified to ensure a flexible transition period for content providers to adapt to OMA DRM. The solution will eventually be removed from Nokia devices when OMA DRM is widely adopted.

Nokia CCL is a so-called Device Policy forward-lock solution, which means the device is hard coded from the factory not to forward certain content. The implemented solution works based on MIME type recognition and allows the terminal to register content as copy protected based on this information."

And this mechanism does not have anything to do with the OMA DRM 1.0 Forward Lock mechanism. Read the document for getting more information (can be found from the Forum Nokia).