Maybe I missed a beat in the last year, but I seem to recall that Adobe put up the closed sign on their digital rights management for pdf documents?

Perhaps I just missed the fact that maybe the requirement for digital rights management for print format documents had not gone away, but Adobe was taking time out to reinvent itself in the face of Microsoft deciding to enter the pdf and xml spaces at the same time – backing both horses as it were.

You know, it’s always rather worrying when a marketplace is dominated by the financial desires of major suppliers as against the needs of the market participants.  Somehow this doesn’t seem to stack up with the idea (that we are supposed to have in Europe – an open market with free access – but then Europeans are crazy guys anyway – they even take Microsoft to Court). 

But the same thing is true in the music and film worlds.  DRM technologies are promoted by specific distributor groupings to serve their own desires (no surprise there) and to lock out competitors.  DRM standards (rather like some infamous Public Key Infrastructure or PKI for short) are characterised by having more than one choice, more than one implementation, and as many patents owned by individual players over them than you can shake a stick at.

So what do you make of the Adobe stance?

It seems that they have finally chosen to abandon their reader in favor of something simpler and (vitally) smaller.  No mention of the fact that switching viewer might give them something with a tad more security than the old viewer that proved so troublesome in the past. 

Smaller viewers are still good.  Not so many of us can cope with a 40Mb download before we can get to see the book (which might only be 20Kb).  Especially on dial-up!

But will the move to flash/XHTML also presage a move away from pdf?  Adobe are also talking about the Open ebook Publication Structure Specification (which is in its essence, it is a JAR package (a zip file plus a manifest).  Inside the package a defined subset of XHTML may be used, along with other CSS and the Dublin Core metadata – Wickipedia). 

And the licensing model is still using the Adobe Lifecycle Policy Server, which in the past has been a big ticket item and has put off all but the largest publishers because it requires major IT to implement and then support it.

The current beta seems to have a few lacunae, printing, working outside of the PC, and not being able to run on anything older than Windows 2000 may upset some communities.  No mention of supporting Adobe reader plug-ins may also create worries for people working in that environment. 

And with a final product launch of early to mid 2007 you might think there is a strategy to stop the general DRM market from doing anything for the next year or so (a trick no doubt learned from Microsoft who, like IBM before them, could have it suggested that they destabilised markets by pre-announcing product). 

Is this good for DRM development?

“This supernatural soliciting cannot be ill, cannot be good.”  Macbeth.

There is little mention about the security of the system except the unclear statement that licensing will be based upon Policy Server, so there is a long way to go yet.

Microsoft is playing out the security game with the anti-virus providers as Vista gets ready to ship, and is likely hoping they don’t get an Elcomsoft experience on the day they ship.

None of what is happening is about getting common (and patent free) DRM standards in place.  But then, as in the music industry, it never was, was it.