Understanding the Digital Rights Management (DRM) for mobile phones

Great article  from the latest Sony Ericsson newsletter for understanding what the DRM  stands for :

Getting the hang of the music industry
Part 3: Understanding licensing and the importance of DRM

Don't miss the first and second part of this topic :

Part 1: Understanding the players, market trends and service definitions>>
Part 2: Understanding codecs and bandwidth issues>>

Digital Rights Management (DRM) is perhaps the most hotly debated subject in the media business today. To truly understand Digital Rights Management is to understand that the key word is "rights".

A piece of music can belong to more than one party such as a songwriter and a composer, and they in turn often assign the management of their interests to an agent such as a music publisher, a record label or a Performing Rights Organization (PRO). Those companies in turn, are responsible for managing the rights of the owner of the work and ensuring that a piece of music is not used in a way that is not covered by a license. DRM simply adds software automation to this process.

Other interesting article for Flash Lite developers are :

New formatting audio and video developer tutorials:
Adding to our series of mobile development tutorials are the two new "Formatting audio for local playback" and "Formatting video for local playback" tutorials, which introduce the broader concepts of digital audio and video, outline how this applies to Sony Ericsson mobile phones with recommended parameters and then guide developers through formatting examples.

Comments

[Christopher Wigginton]

And on the consumer side of things;

The "fair use privilege"
http://www.eff.org/cafe/gross1.html