Google Watch

Robin Arnfield writes that Google (GOOG) is being criticized (rightly) for using its own digital-rights management system to control the distribution of copyright-protected videos in its new Google Video Store:

Google announced the Google Video Store last week at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Nevada. Google’s own proprietary DRM technology represents a challenge to existing DRM systems from Microsoft and Apple, also used to control video distribution over the Internet.
By creating yet another DRM system, Google is restricting rather than enabling the distribution of content over the Internet, critics say.
Commercial Content
DRM is necessary to protect commercial content that Google intends to sell via Google Video Store. CBS shows, National Basketball Association games, Charlie Rose interviews, and vintage episodes from old television series are among the content that will be on sale once the store opens.
To use Google Video Store, viewers will need to install a Google Video application on their Windows-based computers.
The use of yet another DRM scheme would not have generated such a debate were it not for the growing desire of consumers to watch video on devices other than their computers. While a personal computer can carry many kinds of programs to play videos using content-protection software from most any provider, playing video content on mobile devices is impossible if that content is protected by a particular DRM scheme that the mobile device can’t understand.
Mobile phones, iPods, game machines, and portable-DVD players all are being used for viewing videos. These portable devices are hard-coded in their firmware to accept certain kinds of DRM-protected files. If the player does not have the DRM framework already built in to read, for example, DRM-protected Windows Media files, then it cannot play those videos.

Posted by on January 11th, 2006 at 6:43 am


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