It's looking less and less likely that the future of online music won't have DRM dictating to us what we can do with our files. However, there may be some consolation to be found in a new project being spearheaded by Sun: the Open Media Commons.
The idea behind Sun's Open Media Commons is to get contributors to "develop royalty-free open standards for digital content and commit to cross-industry growth and prosperity, ensuring both intellectual property protection and user privacy." We already seen that closed, proprietary DRM techniques are impacting online music sales. Could an open DRM standard be the solution?
Sun seems to think so and wants the open source community on board to help it create its new media standards. However, will the community be so keen to participate, or would it rather see DRM toppled from lack of interoperability?
Perhaps a better question would be whether the community can count on DRM crumbling, or whether it should keep close to the enemy and at the very least try to ensure that the dominant content delivery system is open and usable across various platforms, music players and of course, not locked down by commercial interests (codec wars, anyone?) Given the nature of DRM, can such a thing really exist and be successful?
Regardless of whether you're enthusiastic or sceptical about the project, Sun Laboratories teams will be contributing to 'Project DReaM' over the coming weeks, as will (Sun hope) the open source community, so we should start to see what sort of shape this project is taking.
