Microsoft removes more legal obstacles
Published: 13 Apr 2004 11:05 BST
"More and more, it became clear to us that InterTrust had some foundational patents that we would need to license," said David Kaefer, Microsoft's director of technology policy.
InterTrust's patents involve ways of attaching rules to particular bits of data that would control how that information could be used in different environments.
For example, a piece of music might be authorised by record labels to be played only for a month, without additional payment. If that rule system followed that song while it was downloaded from the Internet, put onto an MP3 player, and even transferred to the Xbox hard drive to be played later, it would probably run squarely into InterTrust's patent portfolio.
"In traditional approaches, you had to protect the computer to protect information," said InterTrust chief executive officer Talal Shamoon. With his company's technique, the particular computer itself is less critical, because "the information is always protected," he said.
While popularly associated with protecting media like music or video, these types of rule-based techniques -- and InterTrust's patents -- also can be applied to data transferred in the course of ordinary computing procedures, particularly as Microsoft and other companies move toward "secure computing," or attempts to ensure that hackers and virus writers don't take over the innards of personal computers.
The settlement is a clear sign that Microsoft sees digital data security, whether in the multimedia, business or ordinary computing context, as increasingly fundamental to its future, analysts said. The company also increased its stake last week in ContentGuard, a digital rights management developer. ContentGuard's technology underpins the way that Office keeps business documents secure, supplementing InterTrust's techniques.
"Those two technologies might be moving closer together," Directions on Microsoft's Rosoff said. "Microsoft might even be working on some kind of unified rights management technology that might be applied more broadly. I think that's the direction they're moving in."
CNET News.com's Matt Hines contributed to this report.
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