The DVB Project has announced that it is fostering the formation of a licensing programme covering patents essential to its Content Protection, Copy Management technology (CPCM). The next meeting of holders of CPCM technology was scheduled to occur on Wednesday, 12 March, in Budapest. The Budapest meeting was open to anyone that had a good faith belief that it holds patents essential to the CPCM specification and was willing to consider licensing these patents on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms. The CPCM technical specification was recently finalised and approved by the DVB Steering Board for formal standardisation by ETSI.
An initial meeting of holders was held in Geneva in mid-December. Some 12 companies participated and agreed to have a further meeting to discuss steps that could lead to the formation of a CPCM licensing programme. As part of its effort to foster patent pools covering its specifications, DVB convened the Budapest meeting of CPCM holders. It was expected, however, that the patent holders will shortly select a commercial facilitator to take forward the pooling effort.
DVB-CPCM is a system for Content Protection and Copy Management of commercial digital content delivered to consumer products. CPCM manages content usage from acquisition into the CPCM system until final consumption, or export from the CPCM system, in accordance with the particular usage rules of that content. Possible sources for commercial digital content include broadcast (e.g., cable, satellite, and terrestrial), Internet-based services, packaged media, and mobile services, amongst others. CPCM is intended for use in protecting all types of content — audio, video and associated applications and data. CPCM provides specifications to facilitate interoperability of such content by networked consumer devices for both home networking and remote access.
The specification has been finalised and approved by the DVB Steering Board and has been forwarded for formal standardisation by ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute).
For more on DVB's effort to foster a CPCM licensing programme, contact DVB's Legal Director, Carter Eltzroth, at eltzroth@dvb.org. As part of its policy governing the licensing of patents essential to its specifications, the DVB fosters the formation of voluntary licensing programmes. This encouragement of patent pools, and DVB's policy on intellectual property rights, are described at http://www.dvb.org/membership/ipr_policy.
