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 …
Context & Ripple Effects
Media Rights Technologies is not a consumer brand — it sells copy protection — and it is now wielding the DMCA itself as a sales instrument, sending cease-and-desist letters to Apple, Microsoft and other platform makers alleging that Vista, Flash, RealPlayer and iTunes are 'infringing products' because they do not deploy enough of it.
The move lands two years into a running argument about whether DRM helps or hurts the people who buy media: commentary as far back as December 2005 warned that music collections would bite the DRM dust as protection schemes churned. MRT's gambit inverts that debate — instead of arguing DRM is too restrictive, it argues the big platforms are legally negligent for shipping too little of it.
First-order effects
- Apple, Microsoft, Adobe and Real each face formal legal pressure asserting their flagship media stacks are DMCA-infringing for under-protection — a claim they must answer with lawyers even if it never reaches court.
- MRT converts a cease-and-desist letter into market positioning, putting its own protection technology in front of every platform vendor it names at essentially no cost.
Second-order effects
- If the 'not enough DRM = infringement' framing gains any traction, media platforms face pressure to license third-party protection suites like MRT's rather than relying on built-in mechanisms, opening a paid slot inside Windows, iTunes and Flash that did not previously exist.
- Rival DRM vendors gain a template: the DMCA becomes a competitive weapon usable against any platform whose protection can be characterized as inadequate, raising the litigation tax on shipping any media playback stack.
Third-order effects
- Enforcement law written to stop circumvention is being repurposed to compel adoption — if that reading holds, anti-circumvention statutes shift from protecting content owners against pirates to disciplining the platforms themselves over how strictly they lock down media.
- Platform vendors' calculus on DRM moves from engineering choice to liability management, pushing the industry toward whichever protection scheme minimizes legal exposure rather than whichever serves users.
The trend: Digital rights enforcement is migrating from blocking pirates to pressuring platforms, as protection vendors discover the DMCA can be aimed at products deemed too open as well as tools used to crack them.