Most of the memory card standards have some form of copyright protection integrated for protecting digital media that have been purchased online from being illegally distributed. You can find below the different copyright protection technologies that are used by the memory card standards.
CPRM, Content Protection for Recordable Media, is the copyright protection technology used by the SD Memory Card, miniSD and microSD. It was developed by 4C, the digital contents copyright protection technology licensing organization of IBM, Intel, Matsushita, and Toshiba.
DRM, Digital Rights Management, is the copyright protection technology used in MagicGate copyright format that can be found in all Memory Stick cards. It was developed by the SDMI association, Secure Digital Music Initiative, which also provides the guidelines for developing compliant digital rights management formats. AAC and WMA are the two major audio compression formats that support DRM.
secureMMC was introduced in 2005 by MultiMediaCard Association to be employed by the MMCplus and MMCmobile memory cards. The secureMMC application uses DRM, Digital Rights Management, and VPN, Virtual Private Network, technologies developed by Open Mobile Alliance, OMA.
TrustedFlash was introduced in September 2005 by SanDisk Corporation as their own copyright protection technology. The TrustedFlash can be used by all memory card standards but will first be available in the SD Memory Card, miniSD and microSD. Among the corporations that have adopted the TrustedFlash technology are EMI Music, Samsung, Yahoo Music and NDS. The TrustedFlash copyright protection technology is also the one used by grūvi, memory cards with preloaded with digital media.
Although there are different copyright protection technologies the principals and the end result are more or less the same. When a customer downloads a copyright protected digital song from an online store the song is encrypted specifically for that customer. To listen to the song the customer must activate the reader software, a process that verifies the identity of the software’s owner and provides an electronic key for decrypting the encrypted files.
The copyright protection technologies can also be configured for various distribution scenarios. For example, songs downloaded from an online music store may only be played as long as the customer maintains a subscription, titles can be configured to expire after they have been played a number of times or on a particular date. Copyright protection technologies can also be configured to restrict the number of times a user can copy the song, restrict to how many computers the song can be copied to and to prevent users from editing or sampling the song. It may also include the accounting for paying royalties to the authors of the material.
Today, copyright protection is mostly supported by some digital audio formats and some online music stores. But as online distribution evolves and illegal data file sharing is growing, copyright protection will soon be used in all copyright digital media that is distributed both online and offline.
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