Mobile big boys buddy up to stop pirates

The high-rollers of the mobile world - including Nokia, mm02, Intel and Samsung - have joined together in an effort to fight off what they see as the next major threat to the market - piracy.

Hardware makers, operators and content suppliers have formed a new organisation to licence an anti-piracy technology to mobile companies, in a bid to stop piracy of music and film downloads and prevent mobiles becoming the next favourite tool of file-swappers.

The organisation, snappily entitled Content Management Licence Administrator (CMLA), hopes that the new technology, developed by the Open Mobile Alliance, will act as a ubiquitous standard. It will encourage wide adoption and interoperability to head off the pirates.

The group will also provide compliance guidelines for mobile companies. The agreements should be made available during the first half of the year, with a toolkit including encryption goodies ready by the end of 2004.

Mobile analysts have cautiously welcomed the developments. Ovum's Dario Betti said in a statement that the technology "is a milestone for the wireless content industry as it paves the way for rich multimedia content such as music downloads by enabling super-distribution and porting of content to more than one device... However, this is not the definitive version of the standard; important details will be finalised only by June 2004. This means that mobile operators will have to wait at least until the second half of 2005 before seeing devices on the market that can support it."