Thursday, June 3, 2004
SD Card Copyright Protection on Handsets Non-Standard?
Posted by Jonathon Watkins in "NEWS" @ 04:00 PM
There may be trouble ahead in the world of SD media. The Inquirer are report from Computex that:
"….the way SD cards try to handle copyright protection doesn’t exactly match the handset industry’s initiative. Which is going to be a problem if you’re a network operator like O2 which is trying to encourage its subscribers to pay to download music. At present, if you store a music clip onto the handset’s CD card and then tried to insert that SD card into a different kind of device – such as a music centre, for example – in theory the SD card's copyright protection should kick in and prevent this. Because you don't have the right licence. Why? Well, although the SD in SD Memory Card stands for 'secure digital', it is actually built to comply with the SDMI (Secure Digital Music Initiative) specification of CPRM (Content Protection for Recordable Media). CPRM is a standard jointly developed by the 4C Entity, LLC – that’s the digital rights protection organisation created by Intel, IBM, Toshiba and Matsushita."
It gets a bit more complicated than that but the upshot is, if you buy music from a network operator (which has to be stored on a SD card) and you insert the card into your PDA, it probably won't play. Oh joy. :?
"….the way SD cards try to handle copyright protection doesn’t exactly match the handset industry’s initiative. Which is going to be a problem if you’re a network operator like O2 which is trying to encourage its subscribers to pay to download music. At present, if you store a music clip onto the handset’s CD card and then tried to insert that SD card into a different kind of device – such as a music centre, for example – in theory the SD card's copyright protection should kick in and prevent this. Because you don't have the right licence. Why? Well, although the SD in SD Memory Card stands for 'secure digital', it is actually built to comply with the SDMI (Secure Digital Music Initiative) specification of CPRM (Content Protection for Recordable Media). CPRM is a standard jointly developed by the 4C Entity, LLC – that’s the digital rights protection organisation created by Intel, IBM, Toshiba and Matsushita."
It gets a bit more complicated than that but the upshot is, if you buy music from a network operator (which has to be stored on a SD card) and you insert the card into your PDA, it probably won't play. Oh joy. :?
