IEC 62227 should help all players in adopting the digital rights

The International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) – the world’s leading organization that prepares and publishes International Standards for all electrical, electronic and related technologies– has published a new Standard on digital rights permission codes for multimedia home server systems that paves the way for multimedia content to be used across different platforms legally.

At present, it is not allowed without a permission  for consumers to copy DVDs, store the content on a personal computer or any home server, and play it back on MP3 players for example. This is because DRM technologies, used for protecting individual content, do not yet have a protocol that allows for the exchange of permission information.

DRMs refer to access control technologies used by many content provider companies to protect copyrighted material, prevent unauthorized duplication of their work and limit usage of digital media or devices. The movie and recording industry, online music stores, electronic book publishers all use their own specific DRM technology to control access to their data. Additional controls come from the fact that digital content downloaded from one provider is often associated with one type of support or device only.

To provide consumers with this type of content usage environment, to give them authorized access to all kinds of digital content regardless of the support they use to store it, a method is required for describing content permissions across different DRMs.

IEC 62227 solves these issues by helping to provide digital contents rights holders and consumers with a simplified permission code that extends across different DRMs. The IEC Standard makes it possible to take complex permission information from rights holders for a wide variety of content, segmented by purpose and usage terms, and simplify its components by converting them into a numerical code so that consumer devices – mobile phones, household television receivers, set-top boxes, personal computers, music or game players, car navigation systems – can decode them.

Shuichi Matsumura, who is Technical Area Manager of IEC Technical Committee 100/TA 8 – the IEC group responsible for the new IEC Standard – says: “IEC 62227 will help create and expand new business opportunities in the market segment of contents, distributions, services and devices. This first edition of IEC 62227 should help all players in adopting the digital rights permission code and make everybody’s life easier.”