Company targets Apple, Microsoft and others for not using enough DRM

What do Vista, Flash, RealPlayer, and iTunes have in common? According to Media Rights Technologies (MRT), all of them are infringing products under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and MRT has just sent cease-and-desist letters to Microsoft, Adobe, Real, and Apple.

“Together these four companies are responsible for 98 percent of the media players in the marketplace; CNN, NPR, Clear Channel, MySpace, Yahoo, and YouTube all use these infringing devices to distribute copyrighted works,” said MRT CEO Hank Risan in a statement. “We will hold the responsible parties accountable. The time of suing John Doe is over.”

Media Rights Technologies is not a content owner, so why are they suing under the DMCA? The legal argument is a bit complicated but goes like this: Microsoft, Adobe, Real, and Apple make media player software. That software can tune into digital music streams like Internet radio stations, many of which are transmitted without any sort of DRM attached. Although streams are designed to be ephemeral, it’s trivial to use streamripper software to snag copies of the songs being played through such services. MRT claims that all four companies should have used some form of DRM to protect streams—or rather, they should have used one particular form of DRM, the “X1 SeCure [sic] Recording Control.” And who makes X1? MRT does.

Essentially, the company has sent letters to four of the biggest players in the industry, threatening them with lawsuits that could lead to “statutory damages of at least $200 to $2500 for each product distributed or sold” unless they adopt the company’s proprietary streamripping protection code. The legal argument at work here is that, under the DMCA, “mere avoidance of an effective copyright protection solution is a violation of the act.”

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