The Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) has denied that it is responsible for setting the $1 per device charge for digital rights management on mobile phones. The denial is in response to a reuters story that came out claiming that OMA was responsible for the charge instead of MPEG-LA, the group that has actually the charge. Although I reported on this article a few weeks ago, I’m afraid I concentrated on some interesting figures and completely missed the fact that Reuters had blamed the wrong group for the charge. This is what happens when you don’t pay attention…
Anyway, to clear it up, OMA set a standard for music DRM on mobiles so that the technology would be interoperable between different carriers and different manufacturer’s handsets. All this was well and good until a bunch of companies that owned patents that were needed by the technology banded together to create the $1 per device charge. Although the charge results in some ridiculous payments for the patent holders (there were $674 million mobile handsets sold last year) it is still just $1 per handset – and the one’s that play digital music are likely to be in the hundreds of dollars. If they sold licences to the manufacturers irrespective of handsets they would be accused of favoring the big guys. Of course, they could lower the charge or make the technology freely available…if they wanted to…
Related stories:
— 4 electronics giants team on DRM standard
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