For its part, the recording industry has done one smart thing in its struggle to control copyrights in the new world of downloadable music: It hired Leonardo Chiariglione to head the industry's Secure Digital Music Initiative. Chiariglione, who led the team that created the original MPEG standard, knows compression. Now, as executive director of SDMI, he looks to develop a digital format that offers "not only compression, but also protection."
For his part, Chiariglione would rather not be seen as beholden to his benefactor. "SDMI will come up with a technical format for the rules governing the fair use of music," he says. "It will not come up with the rules themselves."
All the Big Five music labels have a say in whether or not the standard is adopted, or even funded, but Chiariglione believes that if he comes up with an elegant enough solution, the world will eagerly adopt it.
SDMI plans to release a spec for portable devices - suddenly a crowded market with Diamond Multimedia's Rio and RealNetworks' hardware play - in time for Christmas. And by next March SDMI plans to have an end-to-end architecture for distributing music over the Web.
"Today there's no conscience associated with content," Chiariglione says. "We're going to offer access to content in a way consumers have never experienced before."
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