Beyond Entertainment

What companies outside the entertainment industry are already using this technology to experiment with super-distribution?

The very reason IBM set up the Digital Media Group, which I am in, is to go across industry—to take a lot of the things we have been working on in the media industry and look at how that is going to transcend all industries. Because media is media—whether it's for business or entertainment, there is a common element that has to be addressed. So what we've done is taken the next step to create this platform framework called the Digital Media Factory.

The DMF, in essence, enables the IBM e-business infrastructure. You see the "e" in our commercials, allowing for media to flow freely through the e-business infrastructure and IBM middleware, for which DRM is just one part on an open framework that we have evolved. There are no standards for DRM that are being reported right now, but we are anticipating that those standards will plug into the framework.

Consider the healthcare industry. If you look at the secure distribution of health records for MRI, for X-rays, there are imaging opportunities there for DRM and solutions it can provide. For wireless, there is an announcement we made with Nokia. Nokia is plugging in its server to our DMF for content to be secured and distributed to wireless devices. Content could take the form of music or video clips, or it could be business content and the sharing of a graphic-rich file or video.

And there are other uses. Think about manufacturing. Think about the airline industry. All of the maintenance associated with fixing planes? In many cases you'll want your documents associated with the logs as part of business going forward. In the retail industry, you could use digital content controls for promotions at a kiosk for various retail outlets, such as a Barnes & Noble promotion of electronic books, distributed digitally.

Is digital content protection something that all companies will be looking at five years from now?

I think we are on the cusp of this growth right now. We've seen the pain identified with MP3 files in the entertainment business and what it's done to that industry. That has really lit a fire under other commercial businesses to start thinking about how we are going to allow for distribution of digital content within their world.

What are we going to do in our world as our content or capabilities move to the Internet or to digital platforms? What kinds of digital rights or copyright protections or technologies can be employed to protect our content—whether it be for business consumption, which might be proprietary information; educational, which might be copyrighted for fee-based content, from online or distance learning, because you're charging for the course; or for industrial purposes to actually distribute maintenance logs and information that might have graphics and schematics associated with maintenance logs? Every industry is now looking at this.

It's difficult to take a DRM technology that's made to be used only for music and make it work for other companies. And there are different ways you're going to want to have rights to the content. So instead of having a stand-alone technology, we have plugged it into an open framework for IBM middleware so that you have the flexibility to use the DMF specific to your industry or your company's needs.

As for the future, I think we're going to move toward standards. There needs to be a set of standards, but it's very difficult to work with standards. How do you standardize security? You can go so far as to say there are standards associated with digital rights management, but you can't divulge all the secrets as to how you're securing content because the secret gets out and you've lost. It is necessary to have standards at certain levels to how these things operate.

We are working diligently with those standards bodies on how this will evolve, organizations like MPEG (Moving Picture Experts Group) and OMA (Open Mobile Alliance). Our part is to work through the issues and especially how it evolves, so that it's standing but still open, as opposed to a completely vertical approach—like how Microsoft would approach it, which would be their way or the highway.