Sun will be releasing its entire digital rights management (DRM) technologies, known as "Project DReaM," from its internal Sun Labs program under the OSI-approved Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL). Announced by Sun President and COO Jonathan Schwartz during the Progress and Freedom Foundation Aspen Summit held August 21-28, in Colorado, Sun's DRM releases will be part of a new open-source community project, called the Open Media Commons initiative, which will be aimed at developing a royalty-free digital rights management standard.

"We fundamentally believe that a federated DRM solution must be built by the community, for the community," Schwartz said. "And 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."

Cross-industry collaboration is needed to develop an open, safe and business-friendly approach to the free creation, duplication and distribution of digital content, implored Schwartz.

"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 said during a keynote speech at the Progress and Freedom Foundation Aspen Summit. "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 be releasing the following Project DReaM technologies in coming weeks:

• 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.

• JavaTM 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.

• SunTM 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 plans to continue sharing technologies with the community and will be contributing its experience in the area of identity management that the company has gained from its participation in the Liberty Alliance. [...read more...]

From the latest issue:

Recent Blog Entries as of March 21, 2010, 11:24 am
Oracle Works to Assuage the Anxieties of Its Customers SysAdmin News Bites Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center Released Suits and Their Countersuits A More Direct Channel Model Planned for Oracle-Sun	The Importance of Information Storage and Management Sun POJO Service Engine User's Guide Sun Storage 7000 2010.Q1 Quality and Features PSA Deploys GlassFish in the Manufacture of Peugeot, Citroën Vehicles Running VirtualBox VMs as Services in Windows
Blog RSS Feed