The name Philips has long been associated with consumer electronics, but as the concept of the connected home has developed and begun to take on meaning, Philips Semiconductors has become one of the main suppliers of silicon for this segment. Philips finds itself, as a semiconductor-solutions provider, in a situation where it has to think through and develop a number of possible scenarios for the connected home. Some of the questions are obvious. Will the digital home be PC-centric or TV-centric or both? How will it be networked? Other questions are not so obvious. How can DVDs be transferred onto a home network, if it's illegal to make even a single backup copy of a legitimately purchased disc? How will digital rights management (DRM) schemes operate across a range of mobile devices?
DigiTimes.com put these questions to Menno Kleingeld, senior marketing director with the Home business unit at Philips Semiconductors, when he recently visited Taipei.
This is Part IV of a four-part interview. Part I appeared on 3 July, Part II on 4 July, and Part III followed on 5 July.
Q: DRM seems to have displaced forms of conditional access (CA). A lot of people now have misgivings about the digital millennium copyright act (DMCA) and the regime that's in place for DVD video, for instance. It seems particularly unfortunate that it's illegal, as I understand it, to copy a legitimately purchased DVD to a home network.
A: Yes. There is an ongoing debate about whether you should be allowed to make backup copies of DVD disks you have bought, in case of damage to the original, and so on. I mean, whether you transfer that to another disc or to another hard drive does not essentially change the fact that as a consumer you own a certain title, and you have the rights to view it.
Q: My understanding is that under the DMCA, it would be illegal to make a backup copy.
A: Yes, that's correct. And I think there's a lot of resistance from consumers who bought the content and thought that they therefore had the right to view it.
Q: I think that under the older "fair use" assumptions, that would have been the case.
A: Yes. That's what I would have thought as well
Coming back to the total DRM scheme, my guess is it is going to be important to have protected content because otherwise the content industry itself would have a much harder time selling its content. What is important, here, is that transfer of the DRM rights, from one device to another is facilitated, so that once you've downloaded a title to your PC, and you actually want to take it with you because you bought the content and you want to transfer it to a portable media player, for instance, you also have to enable the transfer of DRM from one device to the other. That is, I think, what is important now.
There are several initiatives in that direction. Microsoft is coming up with a portable DRM scheme where devices are either enabled or disabled for certain content. I think Apple is also working on something very similar, when it comes to MP3 and video. We have our place in those discussions, but within that, we need to be agnostic in terms of what is happening in the industry, so we implement whatever is agreed. Specifically, as a semiconductor manufacturer, we have to follow what is agreed within the industry, and we do not necessarily take a stance in that whole discussion.
Q: Presumably that means that portable devices would have to be able to support a wide range of DRM schemes. How easy or difficult would that be in practice?
A: Let's take a portable media player (PMP), for the moment. There we have to support different codecs, in the first place, so we have to support WM9. We have to support DivX, and we have to support MPEG-4 and MPEG-2. With those formats you usually also get a DRM implementation, and we support those as we see the market move forward.
There are some initiatives in the area of OMA DRM, a more open-standard DRM, which enables this more easily. Those involved with OMA DRM have been looking into the question of how we can enable an open-standard DRM, as opposed to just a single proprietary implementation of a DRM scheme.
Q: When you look at these questions at Philips, does the DMCA in the US, which seems to be the strictest implementation, figure in what you feel you can do or not do? Do you reach conclusions about whether it has jurisdiction, or little or no jurisdiction, or that you are selling products to people in regions where it would have jurisdiction?
A: I think we'll be seeing a lot of cases, possibly court cases or occasions where consumers simply disagree with the legal standards. We've seen the example of CDs that end users couldn't copy, couldn't even rip to MP3. That gave rise to several court cases, and I think the conclusion was that if you buy a CD, you have the right to play it back on several devices. I think the same is going to happen with digital content as well. You will have cases where people say, "I have paid money to own the content for my personal use, so why shouldn't it be possible to transfer it?" I think at Philips we have to take a stance and support whatever is the agreed mechanism. We participate in the discussions, but more from a technological perspective, where we say, "This is possible; this is not possible." We try to take a fairly neutral stance. On the other hand, at Philips we also believe in fair DRM that serves the needs of both the content industry and the consumer.
Q: But at some point I imagine that you have to frankly discuss, within Philips' senior management, whether a product is going to be "legit" on the market or whether you are going to face legal problems.
A: Yes. I think a lot there depends on the software running on the product itself. So for example, with DVD-R, where you had the Region protection, almost every manufacturer that used a chipset from a certain vendor also had a code, a remote control code, say, where he could disable the whole region setting. Do we then allow that as a semiconductor manufacturer? I don't think so, but it's the software that actually enables this kind of use. It is the CE manufacturer who determines what is possible and what not regarding DRM. It’s the semiconductor manufacturer who has to worry about attacks on the chips containing industry secrets, and Philips Semiconductors does.
Q: You've put considerable emphasis on the need for standardization. To what extent do you see standardization as a remaining problem for the STB industry? What important issues remain to be resolved, from the point of view of Philips?
A: I think standardization for the connected home first began with products such as digital media adapters (DMAs), where there clearly was a need to transport content streams according to a specific standard. The DLNA played quite a big role in standardizing MP3, as also some video standards between devices. We are actively participating in the DLNA, as an active member, and we fully support that whole initiative.
Standardization certainly takes on more importance as devices become more sophisticated. Set-top boxes, as such, were originally very much focused on doing MPEG-2 decoding, and there was little that came out of the box, and little interoperability with other devices was required. Now we see STBs growing into personal video recorders (PVRs), with the kind of connectivity that enables transfer of content from the PVR's hard disk to a PMP, for instance. That's one example of where the interoperability between devices comes into play, and where DLNA standards are more and more important.
This is Part IV of a four-part interview. Part I appeared on 3 July, Part II on 4 July, and Part III followed on 5 July.
Menno Kleingeld, senior marketing director, Home business unit, Philips Semiconductors
Article edited by Chris Hall
