Today Intertrust announced that Samsung has taken a license to its patents covering DRM and Trusted Computing technologies. The licenses will cover Samsung’s use of DRM technologies including OMA DRM and Marlin. Products using the technology include a wide range of consumer electronics: set-top boxes, Blu-ray players, portable media players, mobile handsets, PCs, Internet TVs, and so on.
This brings to 13 the number of major licensees that Intertrust has for its IP portfolio, a list that now includes just about all of the big players in the mobile device market (Nokia, Motorola, LG, Sony Ericsson, Philips and Panasonic as well as Samsung) as well as several major wireless carriers (Vodafone, Telefonica) and technology platform providers (Microsoft, Adobe, Sony). Intertrust’s increasing momentum of licensing deals in the mobile arena is evidence not only of the industry’s intent to stay with DRM for certain applications but of the relevance of Intertrust’s technology to certain DRM schemes.
At the same time, the deal with Samsung must have taken quite a while to negotiate. Samsung is one of the major backers of Marlin, a DRM scheme for connected devices based on technology from Intertrust; Marlin was first announced in 2005, and the first Marlin spec appeared in 2006. Samsung is the last of the Marlin co-founders — the others being Sony, Philips, and Panasonic — to license Intertrust’s IP. In any case, the deal bodes well for the future of Marlin DRM on Samsung’s wide variety of consumer electronics products.
