OpenMG is a

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) system developed by

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 ...

for managing and protecting digital music data on a personal computer. It was originally designed for audio files in ATRAC3 format; the compliant software, e.g. Sony

SonicStage SonicStage is a discontinued software product from Sony that is used for managing portable devices when they are plugged into a computer running Microsoft Windows. It comprises a music player and library manager, similar to iTunes, Windows Media ...

, is usually capable of transcoding

MP3 MP3 (formally MPEG-1 Audio Layer III or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III) is a coding format for digital audio developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany, with support from other digital scientists in the United States and elsewhere. Origin ...

and

WAV Waveform Audio File Format (WAVE, or WAV due to its filename extension; pronounced "wave") is an audio file format standard, developed by IBM and Microsoft, for storing an audio bitstream on PCs. It is the main format used on Microsoft Wind ...

files to OpenMG/ATRAC3. The file extensions OpenMG-encrypted files use are and . Sister technologies OpenMG Light (for mobile devices) and OpenMG X were also created.

Development

OpenMG was created alongside MagicGate in an effort to protect digital music copyright. It was released alongside the Memory Stick Walkman and VAIO Music Clip. It is compliant with the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) version 1.0 industry group specification formed in February 1999. There has been at least one reported case when a security update of

Windows XP Windows XP is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It was released to manufacturing on August 24, 2001, and later to retail on October 25, 2001. It is a direct upgrade to its predecessors, Windows 2000 for high-end and ...

and

Windows 2000 Windows 2000 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft and oriented towards businesses. It was the direct successor to Windows NT 4.0, and was released to manufacturing on December 15, 1999, and was officiall ...

broke OpenMG-compliant software. This issue was later resolved.

Method

Audio files encrypted using OpenMG cannot be played on another computer. OpenMG consists of a "check-in" and "check-out" system, whereby a music file can be transferred from a computer to up to three portable devices. It cannot be transferred to a fourth, unless at least one of the other three devices gets checked back in to the computer.

Compatible software

*OpenMG Jukebox *

*MAGIQLIP2 *BeatJam * Connect Player *x-app *VAIO Media The compliant music organization systems work by "checking out" and "checking in" the files to/from portable players, keeping only one copy unlocked in order to hinder proliferation of copies. SonicStage 3.4 includes an option to remove DRM from one's entire media library, allowing unrestricted use. However, this feature is disabled for copies without a license.

Criticisms of OpenMG

The 'checking in' and 'checking out' of files can be cumbersome and risky in comparison with unprotected data. Side effects include user complaints of being locked out of their own original recordings, unable to transfer them to the computer. With some Sony portable audio players it is not possible to directly drag and drop the desired tracks to the device's visible directory. With the combination of OpenMG with MagicGate, Sony intends to restrict the files to be only moved instead of copied, artificially emulating the restrictions of physical objects. However, as of the most recent releases of Sonicstage, files can be "checked out" of the library an unlimited number of times to a portable device, without the need to "check in" any of them. There has been anecdotal evidence that OpenMG modules tend to "choke" reading corrupted MP3

ID3 ID3 is a metadata container most often used in conjunction with the MP3 audio file format. It allows information such as the title, artist, album, track number, and other information about the file to be stored in the file itself. There are tw ...

tags. A ''

Wall Street Journal ''The Wall Street Journal'' is an American business-focused, international daily newspaper based in New York City, with international editions also available in Chinese and Japanese. The ''Journal'', along with its Asian editions, is published ...

'' article that reviewed the Sony VAIO Music Clip player in 2000 noted that the OpenMG and MagicGate technologies "treats users like criminals".

Notes

External links