A US District Court has issued a preliminary ruling on the patent dispute between Intertrust and Microsoft. Intertrust is a DRM company that was all-but-insolvent when it was acquired for nearly half a billion dollars by Sony and Philips last year — money that was a tangible vote of confidence for its patent claims, which were in competition with claims from ContentGuard, a company that Microsoft had made an enormous investment in, in order to acquire its patents.
Now the courts are leaning toward Intertrust, which is bad news for DRM. ContentGuard's XrML is the basis of an ongoing standards-setting effort at OASIS (I'm part of it), has been incorporated (in part) into MPEG4, and forms the basis for the rights-signalling in Office 11, Longhorn, and the-system-formerly-known-as-Palladium.
I've no doubt that these giants will work out some kind of solution, eventually, involving lots of quid pro quo and cash changing hands between MSFT and Sony/Philips, but for now, this means significant instability in a number of really advanced, potentially deadly DRM efforts around the world.
(Thanks, Jason!)
