Intertrust Technologies Corporation is a software technology company specializing in trusted

distributed computing A distributed system is a system whose components are located on different computer network, networked computers, which communicate and coordinate their actions by message passing, passing messages to one another from any system. Distributed com ...

. Intertrust’s product lines consist of a DataOps platform, Application protection and Content protection solutions. Much of Intertrust's

digital rights management Digital rights management (DRM) is the management of legal access to digital content. Various tools or technological protection measures (TPM) such as access control technologies can restrict the use of proprietary hardware and copyrighted works. ...

(DRM) business is based on the Marlin DRM technology, which Intertrust founded along with four consumer electronics companies:

Sony , commonly stylized as SONY, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. As a major technology company, it operates as one of the world's largest manufacturers of consumer and professional ...

Panasonic formerly between 1935 and 2008 and the first incarnation of between 2008 and 2022, is a major Japanese multinational corporation, multinational Conglomerate (company), conglomerate corporation, headquartered in Kadoma, Osaka, Kadoma, Osaka P ...

Philips Koninklijke Philips N.V. (), commonly shortened to Philips, is a Dutch multinational conglomerate corporation that was founded in Eindhoven in 1891. Since 1997, it has been mostly headquartered in Amsterdam, though the Benelux headquarters i ...

, and

Samsung The Samsung Group (or simply Samsung) ( ko, 삼성 ) is a South Korean multinational manufacturing conglomerate headquartered in Samsung Town, Seoul, South Korea. It comprises numerous affiliated businesses, most of them united under the ...

. Intertrust is headquartered in

Silicon Valley Silicon Valley is a region in Northern California that serves as a global center for high technology and innovation. Located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, it corresponds roughly to the geographical areas San Mateo County ...

and has offices in

Tokyo Tokyo (; ja, 東京, , ), officially the Tokyo Metropolis ( ja, 東京都, label=none, ), is the capital and largest city of Japan. Formerly known as Edo, its metropolitan area () is the most populous in the world, with an estimated 37.468 ...

Seoul Seoul (; ; ), officially known as the Seoul Special City, is the capital and largest metropolis of South Korea.Before 1972, Seoul was the ''de jure'' capital of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea) as stated iArticle 103 ...

London London is the capital and largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary down to the North Sea, and has been a majo ...

Paris Paris () is the capital and most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), making it the 30th most densely populated city in the world in 2020. S ...

Mumbai Mumbai (, ; also known as Bombay — the official name until 1995) is the capital city of the Indian state of Maharashtra and the ''de facto'' financial centre of India. According to the United Nations, as of 2018, Mumbai is the second- ...

Beijing } Beijing ( ; ; ), alternatively romanized as Peking ( ), is the capital of the People's Republic of China. It is the center of power and development of the country. Beijing is the world's most populous national capital city, with over 21 ...

Tallinn Tallinn () is the most populous and capital city of Estonia. Situated on a bay in north Estonia, on the shore of the Gulf of Finland of the Baltic Sea, Tallinn has a population of 437,811 (as of 2022) and administratively lies in the Harju ' ...

Riga Riga (; lv, Rīga , liv, Rīgõ) is the capital and largest city of Latvia and is home to 605,802 inhabitants which is a third of Latvia's population. The city lies on the Gulf of Riga at the mouth of the Daugava river where it meets the Ba ...

and

Bangalore Bangalore (), officially Bengaluru (), is the capital and largest city of the Indian state of Karnataka. It has a population of more than and a metropolitan population of around , making it the third most populous city and fifth most ...

History

Victor H. Shear received a BA in sociology from

Brandeis University , mottoeng = "Truth even unto its innermost parts" , established = , type = Private research university , accreditation = NECHE , president = Ronald D. Liebowitz , pro ...

, served as chief executive of Data Scientific Corporation from 1982 to 1985, and then co-founded Personal Library Software. Around 1985, Shear attempted to obtain one of the first US

patent A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an enabling disclosure of the invention."A p ...

s for software. For example, one patent covered metering and protecting data on a

compact disc The compact disc (CD) is a Digital media, digital optical disc data storage format that was co-developed by Philips and Sony to store and play digital audio recordings. In August 1982, the first compact disc was manufactured. It was then rele ...

from 1986. The company began under the name Electronic Publishing Resources in January 1990. David M. Van Wie became involved with Intertrust in early 1991. Intertrust's technology, called

(DRM), enabled trusted transactions, from healthcare, enterprise computing to entertainment and consumer electronics. In 1995, the company announced its technology would be used by

Novell Novell, Inc. was an American software and services company headquartered in Provo, Utah, that existed from 1980 until 2014. Its most significant product was the multi-platform network operating system known as Novell NetWare. Under the lead ...

. Former

Bell Labs Nokia Bell Labs, originally named Bell Telephone Laboratories (1925–1984), then AT&T Bell Laboratories (1984–1996) and Bell Labs Innovations (1996–2007), is an American industrial research and scientific development company owned by mult ...

Fellow David P. Maher became chief technology officer in 1999. In 1996, Electronic Publishing Resources was renamed Intertrust Technologies. At the peak of the

Internet bubble The dot-com bubble (dot-com boom, tech bubble, or the Internet bubble) was a stock market bubble in the late 1990s, a period of massive growth in the use and adoption of the Internet. Between 1995 and its peak in March 2000, the Nasdaq Compos ...

in October 1999, despite a lack of any earnings, Intertrust had its

initial public offering An initial public offering (IPO) or stock launch is a public offering in which shares of a company are sold to institutional investors and usually also to retail (individual) investors. An IPO is typically underwritten by one or more investment ...

. It was listed on the

NASDAQ The Nasdaq Stock Market () (National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations Stock Market) is an American stock exchange based in New York City. It is the most active stock trading venue in the US by volume, and ranked second ...

exchange with symbol ITRU. Within six months, the share price rose from $9 to $35, and a secondary offering on April 12, 2000 raised another $92 million. In 2001, two companies were acquired: PublishOne, Inc., and ZeroGravity Technologies, and

Nokia Nokia Corporation (natively Nokia Oyj, referred to as Nokia) is a Finnish multinational corporation, multinational telecommunications industry, telecommunications, technology company, information technology, and consumer electronics corporatio ...

invested $20 million. However, by the end of 2001 losses had climbed to over $115 million a year, and shares were sometimes trading below $1 each. Workforce reductions and office closures were announced in October 2001 and January 2002, which helped to end the losses. In May 2002, further workforce reductions were announced, and marketing and development of software ceased as the company focused on licensing intellectual property. In early 2003, the company became a joint venture of

and Stephens Inc., and

Talal Shamoon Talal G. Shamoon is a Silicon Valley executive, computer scientist, entrepreneur, and investor. In 2003 he became the chief executive of Intertrust Technologies Corporation. Starting in 1999, Shamoon has been involved in the development of digi ...

was appointed as the CEO Intertrust Office

In April 2004, Microsoft settled the 2001 lawsuit, and agreed to pay $440 million to license Intertrust’s patents. The week before the settlement, Microsoft and Time Warner announced they had acquired a majority stake in ContentGuard, a company which developed similar software. In 2006, the company co-founded the Coral Consortium for content interoperability with

Fox Foxes are small to medium-sized, omnivorous mammals belonging to several genera of the family Canidae. They have a flattened skull, upright, triangular ears, a pointed, slightly upturned snout, and a long bushy tail (or ''brush''). Twelve sp ...

and HP. Intertrust licensed DRM technologies to large technology and media corporations. The company then developed technology called

Marlin Marlins are fish from the family Istiophoridae, which includes about 10 species. A marlin has an elongated body, a spear-like snout or bill, and a long, rigid dorsal fin which extends forward to form a crest. Its common name is thought to deri ...

, with mixed success. The continued emphasis on intellectual property caused the company to be called a "

patent troll In international law and business, patent trolling or patent hoarding is a categorical or pejorative term applied to a person or company that attempts to enforce patent rights against accused infringers far beyond the patent's actual value or ...

Huawei Technologies Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. ( ; ) is a Chinese multinational technology corporation headquartered in Shenzhen, Guangdong, China. It designs, develops, produces and sells telecommunications equipment, consumer electronics and various smart ...

announced it would license Marlin in 2011. A 2007 venture using Marlin with

Pioneer Corporation commonly referred to as Pioneer, is a Japanese multinational corporation based in Tokyo, that specializes in digital entertainment products. The company was founded by Nozomu Matsumoto in January 1, 1938 in Tokyo as a radio and speaker repair s ...

called SyncTV had an investment from

HTC Corporation HTC Corporation ( zh, t=宏達國際電子股份有限公司, s=宏达国际电子股份有限公司, p=Hóngdá Guójì Diànzǐ Gǔfèn Yǒuxiàn Gōngsī, first=t) or High Tech Computer Corporation, (literally ''Hongda International Electron ...

in 2012. A

public key infrastructure A public key infrastructure (PKI) is a set of roles, policies, hardware, software and procedures needed to create, manage, distribute, use, store and revoke digital certificates and manage public-key encryption. The purpose of a PKI is to facilit ...

(PKI) service for Marlin called Seacert was announced in 2011. Between 2008 and 2016, Intertrust invested in companies that developed synergistic technologies. In 2010, the company entered into a Latvian-based joint venture called whiteCryption that markets application security technologies. In March, 2013, Intertrust filed a patent suit against

Apple Inc. Apple Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, United States. Apple is the largest technology company by revenue (totaling in 2021) and, as of June 2022, is the world's biggest company ...

Apple settled the suit in April 2014 for undisclosed terms. In October 2014,

Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial Colleges, fourth-oldest ins ...

professor

Robert Tarjan Robert Endre Tarjan (born April 30, 1948) is an American computer scientist and mathematician. He is the discoverer of several graph algorithms, including Tarjan's off-line lowest common ancestors algorithm, and co-inventor of both splay trees a ...

rejoined Intertrust as chief scientist. In December 2016, the company added two investors, the German utility company

Innogy Innogy SE was an energy company based in Essen, Germany. It is now merged and integrated into German energy company E.ON. History The company was created on 1 April 2016, by splitting the renewable, network and retail businesses of RWE into a ...

(acquired by E.ON in 2020) and the

Japan Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north ...

U.S. The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territori ...

venture capital company World Innovation Lab. In April 2017 the company launched with

Google Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...

the PatentShield program. In May 2019, the Australian energy company

Origin Energy Origin Energy an ASX listed public company with headquarters in Sydney. It is a major integrated electricity generator, and electricity and natural gas retailer. It operates Australia’s largest coal-fired power station at Lake Macquarie, New ...

invested $20 million USD in Intertrust. In June 2020, the company announced the Intertrust Platform, which has been described as “a complete ecosystem of data security and rights management products”.

References

External links

* {{official website, http://www.Intertrust.com Digital rights management Companies based in Sunnyvale, California