Anti-piracy technology companies agreed yesterday at the IT Forum in Barcelona on signing a license deal with mobile operators and mobile phone producers for a common DRM (digital rights management) system.

As soon as this license will be accepted by all involved parties we could start talking about an open standard to protect music files, movies and video, and users will have a wide range of options at their disposal, without having to fear any constraint from one particular system.

Larry Horn, vice president of licensing at MPEG LA, a company that represents the key patent holders of digital rights management (DRM) software used in the open standard proposed by the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA), said that there is a real good chance of having an active, fully compatible DRM system by the beginning of 2006.

As soon as this will check out, mobile phone operators and MPEG LA will probably burry the hatchet on the issue of very expensive taxes for protecting digital rights. GSMA members have always complained about these taxes being too high and that it is an abuse which can only cause inconveniences for everybody. Last April, MPEG LA proposed a reduced fee of $0.65 per mobile phone and an annual $0.25 per service per subscriber, but operators and handset makers still argued that was too expensive, and said that joint license payments will still be more expensive than the total revenues from digital entertainment.