Karlin Lillington
The Internet may have been created with the goal of global compatibility, but technology companies are turning a vision of harmony into a battleground over proprietary standards.
Last week, the Software Publishers Association, an industry lobby, suggested companies meet later this year to agree on basic technical standards. The proposal came as a tart response to the latest standards squabble between software giant Microsoft and multimedia developer RealNetworks. The row was over a glitch that caused RealNetworks’s multimedia “player”, which allows Net users to play video and audio, to shut down when used with Microsoft’s browser, Explorer.
Yet a plan is under way to sort out the mess, and also address problems of piracy and copyright.
Some 366 members of MPeg (the Moving Picture Experts Group, part of the International Standards Organisation) recently spent a week in Dublin hammering out details of the non- denominational MPeg4 multimedia standard. The group wants to develop specifications for creating, editing, distributing and playing multimedia digital content, without actually incorporating any specific proprietary technologies.
“MPeg4 is a collaboratively developed standard. It doesn’t represent a company’s standards,” says Liam Ward of Teltec, the Irish research organisation that hosted the MPeg meeting along with Irish national broadcasting service, RTE. Such impartiality led MPeg1 and 2, the group’s earlier specifications for audio and video, to become widely used industry standards.
MPeg4 would also transform the way in which users experience multimedia, letting people interact with objects on screen in new ways. Viewers could move around within a digital scene, blending reality with virtual reality.
“So far, virtual reality hasn’t really taken off because it’s too artificial,” says Ward. Adding “real” elements through video requires an awkward cut-and-paste, frame-by-frame editing method.
MPeg4 would enable the smooth integration of all elements of a digital work because each item would be described as a separate digital object. Objects could be edited individually, then brought together using MPeg4’s standards for compression and transmission.
This object-oriented approach also offers a solution to piracy and copyright problems that threaten to stifle the growth of digital broadcast media, according to the Intellectual Property Management and Protection (IPMP) group, one of the key teams involved in MPeg4’s development.
This mix of law and security experts, rights organisations, and content owners and creators represents the first time MPeg has consulted content creators before issuing a standard.
IPMP has specifications for uniquely identifying each object used in an MPeg4 work, and has created security “hooks”. These are specifications that will allow companies to develop products that lock into the MPeg4 format to manage and protect digital content through encoding or watermarking.
The identification system will allow individual objects to be traced on the Web, says IPMP member Dominique Yon. A computerised “intelligent agent” could be sent out to scour the Net for servers storing or using the object, making it easier to collect royalties or bring prosecutions.
Ward hopes that companies will choose to mesh their products with MPeg4 rather than challenge it with a proprietary standard. The intention of MPeg4, he says, is to circumvent the spawning of multiple standards that become flagbearers for inter-company rivalries and wreak havoc for developers and consumers. The specification will be publicly released in January.