The Role of Architecture in DRM Vendor Economics

The advent of digital rights management (DRM) has lead to the creation of two generations of DRM technologies. First generation technologies largely focused on copy protection, and because of this, many erroneously equate copy protection and DRM. Second generation technologies, however, have begun to address a much broader scope of possibilities associated with the myriad of business opportunities that can be built around the more general idea of managing rights. Nevertheless, to date, DRM vendors have experienced very little success in the marketplace. This in spite of the fact that respected analysts had predicted the growth of a multi-billion dollar DRM market by the year 2004. Experts have postulated a number of reasons for the failure of this market to appear, some related to the business models, others to the technologies themselves, and still others related to the lack of standards in this area. In this paper we consider the role that the definition of a well-defined DRM architecture will have in addressing these problems. In particular, we consider how the specification of a minimal architectural framework can help to guide the development of technologies in DRM, as well as help to identify the role that standards should play and where in the architecture they should be defined. It is important to note that a similar architectural framework was instrumental in the development of Internet technologies and standards. Furthermore, the issues faced by the telecommunications industry in the early eighties are quite similar to those currently faced by the DRM industry. Various networking technologies were available, and what was needed was a technological framework that could integrate them and still allow different kinds of services to the applications that involve communication. It was the layered architecture of the OSI model and the hourglass shape of the TCP/IP protocol suite that provided the necessary framework. It is also important to recognize that in general layered architectures act as a buffer against rapidly changing technologies. The hourglass-shaped structure of TCP/IP has helped to make the Internet universal. Subsequently, the integration of the Internet into the telecommunications industry was supported by a standardization process. Furthermore, the development of standards promoted the integration of independently developed solutions. This paper makes use of the Internet analogy in order to consider how a layered architectural framework can also promote and guide the development of the DRM industry.