The secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) is a working group that develop specifications to secure the distribution of music in digital form worldwide. They associated with worldwide recording, consumer electronics and information technology industries to provide effective way to enable consumers access music, artist and recordings conveniently while protecting intellectual property.
The growing popularity and use of the MP3 format to distribute music digitally, threatened copyright holders and artists, since the MP3 compression technology incorporate no security or authentication features with the files, thus, downloading of digital music has become easily widespread. The Portable Device Specification guide released by SDMI was opted to be the industry’s answer to the widely popular MP3 digital music file format.
The Guide to the SDMI Portable Device Specification Part1, Version 1.0 provides an overview of the contents and benefits of SDMI agreed upon by SDMI member companies. The guide contains set of voluntary principles intended to provide a positive consumer experience while facilitating secure environment for distribution of digital music and its related contents that protects the rights of the artists.
Specification for portable devices is the first achievement of SDMI. The guide discussed the two phases of SDMI’s implementation of its digital rights architecture. The phase 1 includes the implementation of secure digital watermarking scheme and tracking system. Through this, music is tagged with secure watermark (that is hard to remove from the source audio) without damaging it. SDMI’s Portable music players then incorporate these technologies to support both secured and unsecured formats. The phase 2 will ensure that the SDMI complaint players would not play not authorized SDMI tagged music for that device. This means that even if the files were tagged, the device would not play it if it is not authorized to be played on it. The screening technology of SDMI will do this job. It will detect a signal that indicates a software upgrade for the portable device is necessary to play Phase 2 encoded music. The purpose of this screening technology is to provide a mechanism to detect illegitimately distributed music. Upgrading to phase 2 technology is voluntary, but only those upgraded applications can import, play, or transfer releases coded with the Phase 2 specifications. Moreover, contents that are distributed using phase 2 technology will not be played or imported if they are illegitimately or illegally distributed.
There are debates related to this technology, but the SDMI is continuing to work to achieve broader range of digital music applications (beyond portable devices).
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