Microsoft Drives DRM

Digital rights management technology will enable the author or owner of a document, a music file, a game or other digital content to control access rights to that content or even charge for it throughout the distribution process.

Microsoft has teams working on DRM projects in the Palladium development group, the Office unit and the Windows Client division, according to Microsoft documents viewed by CRN. Palladium is the code name for a set of future Windows features that, when combined with new hardware, promise better system integrity and data security.

Internal Office prototypes at Microsoft show what may be in store for DRM features in Office 11 and beyond.

With the prototype software, a user can control whether a document recipient can print it, or copy and paste from it, Microsoft sources said. Future iterations could enable the content owner to set a document to self-destruct by a particular date, or prevent it from being viewed unless the user's PC is attached to a specific domain. Such capabilities could address an emerging array of federal regulations mandating how sensitive documents are stored and accessed, solution providers said.

Other DRM projects under way include a set of exposed DRM APIs to be available in SDK form as well as client-side components, according to the Microsoft documents. The company also is working to get a DRM server, code-named Tungsten, into beta next summer with shipment slated for late 2003, CRN reported last month.

Microsoft would not comment on particular plans other than to say DRM is an important technology effort. The company's existing Windows Media DRM offering is already used by music and video subscription services. At Comdex, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates listed DRM as one technology area still requiring a lot of work.

But the nature of DRM, which touches directly on such sticky issues as fair use of material, makes this field hard to navigate.

"There are huge land mines everywhere in this," said one Microsoft source.

People used to having free access to pretty much anything forwarded their way may not take kindly to being asked to pay for viewing privileges or being required to enter a password to read a paragraph in a Word document, for example.

For these and technical reasons, it appears that the form DRM deliverables will take is in flux. One Microsoft insider said Office 11 was originally slated to field fairly full DRM capabilities but those plans were scaled back along with the .Net My Services game plan.

While Office 11 might offer some DRM capabilities, full-strength DRM won't surface until Office 12, slated to ship in the Longhorn time frame, sources said. Longhorn, now a client-only update for Windows XP, is expected to ship in 2004 or 2005. Office 11, with better XML support, is due next year.

A DRM-enabled version of Office would offer "more granular permissions ... you'll be able to pick a portion of a Word document and make it read-only so no one can screw with it," said a source close to Microsoft.

Whatever the time frame and product specifics, solution providers are eager to add DRM to their arsenal.

The technology could, for example, enable a company in contract negotiations to view documents only for a certain amount of time, said Ken Winell, president and CEO of Econium, a Totowa, N.J., collaboration solution specialist. "If you work on a single version of a contract, you can reduce e-mail [traffic because you don't have to keep sending it back and forth."

Added Winell: "I tell clients to look at movielink.com as a great example of DRM at its best. You download the movie and can view it for 24 hours, but your rights to it expire in 30 days once you start viewing. People can extrapolate that to the enterprise, to defense industries.

"There's no loyalty in consulting. If Econium wins a project, great, but two years later, if a competitor wins, Econium's rights are turned off. It's a control thing."