But whatever your view, mobile DRM is now something that can’t be simply ignored. Estimates of the value of mobile content range from US$26.5 billion in 2009 (the Datamonitor brief ‘Mobile DRM Opportunities (Strategy Focus)’) to US$38.1bn in 2011 (the Informa Telecoms & Media report ‘Mobile Entertainment’). Moreover, says Datamonitor in its ‘Media & Broadcasting Technology: Digital Rights Management (Review Report)’ while 19% of shipped handsets incorporated DRM in 2005, the percentage would rise to 65% by 2009.

What’s It All About?
According to the ‘Digital Rights Management’ report published by the UK All Party Internet Group (APIG) last year, DRM is a generic term for a set of technologies that identify and protect intellectual property in digital form. Beyond that, says the APIG, the content industry identifies systems and mechanisms that can be used to prevent unauthorised copying – or activities that the rights holder wishes to forbid – and terms these Technological Protection Measures (TPMs). Then there are mechanisms that identify digital works and manage the provision of material to customers. Collectively this is styled Rights Management Information (RMI). APIG also cites Intellect, the UK trade association for the hi-tech industry, as explaining that RMI expresses the rights owners’ intent while TPM ensures that this is put into practice.

In general DRM systems aim to manage access to content, restricting it to individuals or organisations that that are entitled by payment or affiliation to have access, and excluding those not entitled. In the case of mobile, content can include wall papers, ring-tones, games, music, video clips, TV programming and films.

From a technology perspective there are a number of approaches to implementing mobile content DRM and, as noted by Sony Ericsson, different usage rights can be applied to the same content for different users. Included in the DRM armoury are: enforcing subscription; restricting access by the encryption of content such that it is only able to be decrypted by authorised users; restricting the number or type of devices that can access the content; limiting the number of times that content can be used; limiting the length of time that the content is accessible; implementing ‘forward lock’ mechanisms; and requiring the user to register with the content owner or publisher before access is granted. Although strictly speaking not used to manage access or ensure correct payment, ‘digital water-marking’ is useful in keeping tabs on what is happening to content and can provide ammunition for legal action if a violation is detected.

As is readily evident, though, not all DRM mechanisms have successfully resisted the attempts of hackers, criminals or just clued-up members of the public to circumvent or compromise their gate-keeping capabilities. Jean-Luc Moullet, vice president, Thomson Software and Technology Solutions USA and a speaker on a special DRM panel convened for the opening day of the 2006 International Broadcast Convention, notes that the two most widely used proprietary DRM solutions - Windows Media DRM and Apple's FairPlay system for iPod - have both been cracked by hackers.

Another fly in the mobile content DRM ointment concerns intellectual property rights (IPRs). A DRM dispute involving the GSM Association (GSMA), the technology platform patent licensing organisation MPEG LA and the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) made headlines in 2005. Essentially what happened was that the GSMA rejected a licensing scheme proposed by MPEG LA, representing an initial group of essential patent holders, for the use of the OMA DRM 1.0 specification. No deal was reached even when a reduced licensing regime was subsequently proposed, and many observers now argue that lack of an industry-wide DRM standard and the enforced use of proprietary solutions risks fragmenting and restricting the mobile content market overall.

The Case For Proprietary
Somewhat counter-intuitively, though, the ABI Research report ‘Mobile DRM Market Analysis and Forecasts’ argued that mobile operators were misguided in trying to reach agreement on an open mobile DRM standard from the get-go. “This is a classic example of what not to do when trying to nurture a new market,” suggested Vamsi Sistla, ABI Research's director, Broadband and Multimedia Research. “It is misguided to pursue an open standard solution in a brand-new market. A better time is after a few years, when the market is disjointed, the competition has changed, and companies can collaborate to benefit from economies of scale. Right now, operators are focusing on their ability to monetise this trend and get their solutions to the market sooner than their competitors. Any emerging technology should find its way into the market by the trial and error of multiple solutions.”

And it is possible to make different DRM solutions interoperate. This is one of the accomplishments of South Korea’s EXIM(Export/Import) DRM standard developed by the country’s Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) and Inka Entworks, and implemented by dominant mobile phone company SK Telecom since the summer of 2006. Using EXIM allows content owners to protect their content, but gives users the freedom to use a variety of playing devices. Reportedly EXIM accommodates 90% of the online music sites and 70% of the playing devices currently used in South Korea.

But another DRM difficulty arises from the fact that, increasingly, mobile content service delivery chains are multi-tenanted. Today, there is the potential to involve network operators, mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs), content owners, content aggregators, terminal vendors, the DRM solutions provider and security specialists, in addition to the end user, in the delivery and consumption of content. All of these parties have to buy into the chosen content management scheme or technology, but there may sometimes be a perceived conflict of interest between some of the parties. For example, the interests of the content owners – that they will be appropriately compensated for their content and their content will be protected against misuse – can sometimes seem to run counter to those of consumers who, having paid for content, may feel that any restrictions on what they do with it are unacceptable.

For And Against
Whatever the technical, commercial or logistical difficulties of implementing mobile DRM, there is a very vocal industry contingent that argues that adequate content protection and management simply has to be put in place. “The growth of the mobile video services market relies not only on the availability of high quality content but also on the industry's ability to provide this content in a secure and feasible way,” according to Zippy Aima, analyst, digital media practice, Frost & Sullivan. Aima was commenting on the introduction in December of SafeNet Inc’s DRM Fusion Toolkit4TV - claimed to be the world’s first DRM solution supporting multiple standards for mobile TV protection.

Again, using Frost & Sullivan data the Mobile Entertainment Forum (MEF) has calculated that the lack of effective mobile DRM would cost Europe alone some €3.5 billion in 2006, or over half the estimated annual turnover of the region’s mobile entertainment industry.

The arguments for appropriate mobile DRM are persuasive. As Datamonitor notes mobile operators are currently seeking to generate increased revenues from content services in order to compensate for falling voice revenues, and to justify high expenditure on 3G licences and infrastructure. Providing high-value content services is pivotal to the strategies of many, but failure to have appropriate control of access to, and use and distribution of, this content risks not only blowing holes in revenue forecasts but also acts to deter the content owners from making the content available in the first instance.

While the pro-DRM lobby can make a credible case, the concerns of the anti-DRM lobby are also understandable. DRM does restrict consumer options and tends to be seen as a ‘tax’ on content consumption from which consumers derive no benefit. Initiatives such as DefectiveByDesign, a campaign of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), render DRM as ‘Digital Restriction Management’ and argue that, while the content owners desire for profit is not in itself wrong, it cannot justify denying the public control over its technology. In Sweden, a main plank in the platform of De Piratenpartij (the Pirate Party) political movement is the promotion of free non-commercial content copying and use. The Pirate Party apparently views the monitoring of sharing as the thin end of the Big Brother wedge, leading on from, say, analysing music file swapping on a peer-to-peer (P2P) network to having licence to intercept e-mails at will. Meantime, the over-zealous application of DRM may drive consumers into the hands of copyright pirates, content forgers and DRM hackers.

So how to reconcile the differing interests of the content owners and end users?  Probably by striking a balance between light-handed access management on the part of the content owners and fair use by the consumers. Which is most likely to be easier to say than do.