Found this on Stockwatch. It is about RTS competitor in the US.
February 26, p.27 of the E-Commerce Survey which discusses
Digital delivery, copyright, Intertrust, etc:
That is not, however, likely to be true for those goods and services that have the best possible answer to the
nightmarish logistics of e-commerce: deliver over the Internet itself. For if you do that, you can eliminate
most of your physical rivals altogether. A lot of computer software is now digitally downloaded by the user.
The next businesses to head this way are music and films?and perhaps newspapers and books. Already
you can buy the ?Rocket e-book? that allows you to download new books at the click of a button;
improvements in home printing and binding may one day make electronic distribution the preferred way to
sell books.
The music business is already heading towards e-distribution, and is in turmoil as a result. Last year a new
release from Public Enemy became the first commercial piece of music to be distributed over the Internet
before appearing in the record shops. The spread of the Atomicpop.com, which released the Public Enemy
number, thinks this is misconceived. He has little sympathy for the traditionalists, even though he himself, as
president of CBS records, used to be one. He recognised the scope for digital downloading several years
ago, and tried to persuade the industry to embrace it. Having failed, he set up Atomicpop instead. His vision
of the future is radical: ?The only permanent bits of this industry are the people who make the music, and the
people who buy it.? But it is also expansive, for he sees the web as a way greatly to enlarge the market for
music.
Does that mean there is no future for the record labels, and that artists will release music straight over the
Internet? No, says Mr Teller, because the web needs filtering, editing, marketing and promoting even more
than the physical world. But he thinks the labels need to restructure themselves from top to bottom: it is not
enough to treat the Internet as just one more distribution channel. If they fail to adapt, labels like his stand
ready to take over, along with a new infrastructure of portable music players, listener-driven music
reviews?and artists keen to escape the record companies? clutches.
What about copyright? Mr Teller strongly supports it. In a digital world, he says, it should not be too hard
to find a way of protecting copyright, even if the SDMI proves not to be the way to do it. One firm that may
offer a better solution to digital-rights management on the web is itself a member of the SDMI : InterTrust,
based in Santa Clara, California. It has devised what Victor Shear, its chairman, calls a ?meta-utility?: a
platform for the conduct of digital e-commerce that protects copyright and deals with payments at the same
time.
To use the InterTrust model, a record company (or, indeed, anybody who has digital content) gets it
packaged into an encrypted file known as a ?Digibox?, which comes complete with rules about use, access
and payment methods. These can be as flexible as the content provider wants to make them: three free
plays followed by a charge, say, or a fixed price for the whole thing, or a system that charges a small
amount for every replay.
Mr Shear?s outfit is not the only one trying to make such a thing: Liquid Audio, Xerox, even Microsoft are
devising their own digital-rights management systems. But InterTrust has the most advanced and capable
technology, protected by at least 12 patents. It has the backing of Universal Music and Bertelsmann;
PricewaterhouseCoopers, the world?s biggest consulting firm, has just signed on to use the technology for its
clients. InterTrust?s may indeed become the main operating system for the new market, and could yet come
to govern the distribution of all digital content over the web, whether it be films, news or books. So has Mr
Shear heard from the Justice Department? Not yet, he responds evenly.
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