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Originally Posted by simplyparticular
So is there some future of Universal DRM that I'm unaware of?  |
Well sort of. Don't know of course if you are aware of it or not. For video the Ultraviolet format is an attempt at a universal drm. It has some interesting features, and by using it I have been able to play a movie bought from one vendor on different devices and through other vendors players. I can buy a movie with a UV code, and play it on my roku, through my lg blu ray player, on my android phone and tablet, and if I had an iOS device I would be able to use that as well. It also is playable on a computer using a flash based player. It however is no longer coming however, but has been in public use now for around four months
They have done this by divorcing the encoding/format from the playback rights. They also allow a few different comment drm schemes for storing the aes key to decode the content. It looks like it will allow pretty universal playback. Now it is not universal in the sense you can't get all content you want in it. Disney for one has not signed on to it. Amazon has, but so far has not actually shown anything using it.
There is no reason this or another similar scheme could be used for ebooks and other digital content, but I have not heard of anybody planning for it yet.
I would love to divorce rights from format though. Then we would not have to worry about conversions from epub to mobi or whatever future format a device uses. It would be great to have a more open system like that then the current vendor to device tie in's we mostly have now.