Stardate 20020224.1031

(On Screen): About a year ago the Strategic Defense Music Initiative (SDMI) fell apart. A combination of overly ambitious and technologically unfeasible goals plus a basic lack of unity of objectives among the participants doomed it.

But you can't keep a good idea down.

Consumer electronics manufacturers and their technology suppliers will meet in Los Angeles on Tuesday (Feb. 26) to form a group devoted to jump-starting the market for portable digital audio devices. The Portable and Networked Audio Device Manufacturers Association, as it has been temporarily dubbed, plans to address interoperability...

...wait for it...

...and content-protection issues that were left unresolved when the Secure Digital Music Initiative ceased its activities last year.

You knew that was coming, didn't you? Interoperability be damned; this is another effort by the record companies to force industry-wide copy protection.

Co-organizer White said the group will take up where SDMI left off on portable devices but that it will work to avoid the mistakes that SDMI made.

The group "isn't a redo of SDMI," said White, who will be the new group's executive director.

Industry observers believe that SDMI grew too large for its structure and had too diverse a membership base to agree on anything. For instance, the group could not reach consensus on a standard framework for digital audio content protection for portable devices.

"After SDMI did not work out real well, Jim [Fleming] came to me," White said. As the two saw it, "the record industry had its concerns, and the IT group at SDMI [which comprised computer manufacturers] had certain things they intended to do, but the consumer electronics industry really never was represented as a group at SDMI."

White said the new group seeks to change that. One task will be to correct the lack of standards for portable-device content protection.

Damned straight. SDMI was dominated by the record labels, who wanted iron control over distribution, and the technology companies, who wanted to design the crypto which would be used and charge a royalty for its use. The consumer electronics industry, as close to the customer's voice as was going to exist, wasn't represented. The customers don't want copy protection, and the consumer electronics industry has to deal with the customers directly and thus also wasn't going to want "content protection". So they weren't allowed to speak.

It's not merely that they couldn't "reach consensus on a standard framework for digital audio content protection" but that there wasn't even any consensus on the desirability of trying to create such a beast.

But this time it will be different, they say. The report claims that the organizers have gotten expressions of interest from 20 to 30 companies but no commitments yet. The problem is that despite the claim, this will actually be no more successful than SDMI was, and for the same reason.

In this case, what the companies in question will want is indeed interoperability. But as mentioned, there is no incentive at all for the big players to join this, because lack of interoperability works in their favor for now through customer lock-in. There's no good reason why Creative Labs will get involved in this, except perhaps to try to scuttle it.

Moreover, there's no good reason at all why CL will incorporate content protection into their devices. Therefore, if this consortium creates an interoperability standard which does include content protection, then devices built to the standard will be viewed by consumers as inferior products, who will continue to purchase from CL.

I might mention that Creative Labs has a long history of complete disinterest in industry standards processes. In the early 1990's, the sound card industry tried to create their equivalent of VESA, and CL refused to play and thus prevented any standard interface for sound cards until Microsoft imposed one on the industry with DirectSound.

If indeed this consortium, "The Portable and Networked Audio Device Manufacturers Association", can be organized and run in such a way as to produce an interoperability standard which does not include content protection, then it would benefit the smaller players in the industry. So they're interested. But if it is a trojan horse to force content protection down their throats, then it is commercial suicide, which is why none of them have committed yet. What they're going to be looking for is just how much influence the record companies will actually have over the process.

The claim that this effort will be different because the record companies won't be invited in is bogus, because the organizers have sold their souls to the recording industry. That's why every other phrase they spout is "content protection".

This effort is doomed because Creative Labs won't play, because the effort's goal is counter to the interests of its customers, and because it's too late.