Consortium Seeks Compatibility
For Antipiracy Software Programs

Some big electronics and media companies are collaborating to head off conflicts between software programs that limit piracy of music, movies and other digital content.

Sony Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co., Philips Electronics NV, Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Samsung Electronics Co., InterTrust Technologies Corp. and News Corp.'s Twentieth Century Fox unit have joined Coral, a consortium being announced today to address potential incompatibilities between antipiracy technologies. The group plans to develop specifications to make it easier for protected files to work with multiple devices and content services, without causing headaches for consumers.

But Coral is starting out without two influential players: Apple Computer Inc., whose iPod device was designed to only play protected songs from its iTunes store, and Microsoft Corp., whose digital-file formats are widely used on other devices but are incompatible with Apple's. The incompatibility is partly because of differences in the companies' software for protecting copyrighted songs.

More conflicts lie ahead, Coral members believe, unless hardware, software and content suppliers start doing something now. "Consumers want to play their content anywhere on any device and should be able to move content from one device to another," said Ruud Peters, head of Philips's intellectual-property-rights unit.

Getting there won't be easy. Record labels and film companies set strict rules about how online content can be used by consumers and enforce those rules with software known by the acronym DRM, for digital rights management. To work effectively, Coral must develop ways to pass those rules from one system to another while ensuring devices and content services with different DRM technologies enforce those rules consistently.

One approach is to have consumer devices contain software that can translate DRM instructions from one system to another. Or, devices could contact a Web-based service that provides translation.

Coral was partly inspired by technology called NEMO -- for networked environment for media orchestration -- developed by InterTrust, a DRM specialist purchased in 2002 by a venture of Philips, Sony and other investors.

Write to Don Clark at don.clark@wsj.com

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