Information Today
Volume17, Number 4 • April 2000
InterTrust Technologies Corp. Announces Its FlyingMedia System, Acquisition of Infinite Ink

InterTrust Technologies Corp., the MetaTrust Utility, has announced the availability of the FlyingMedia publishing digital rights management (DRM) system. According to the company, FlyingMedia provides e-publishers with a sophisticated and highly flexible commerce system that is consumer-friendly, convenient, and easy to use. FlyingMedia, based on InterTrust’s DRM platform, consists of packager and viewer software for published materials, and is supported by the MetaTrust Utility and clearinghouse services. FlyingMedia was expected to ship during the first quarter of this year and be available through MetaTrust Partners.

FlyingMedia lets publishers create business rules, associate them with published text, and package both the content and the rules in secure containers using InterTrust’s DigiBox container technology. Information in the InterTrust system is encrypted and stored in a format called a DigiBox container. Once in a DigiBox container, only InterTrust’s InterRights Point software or Rights/PD software can access the information. Further, the information remains secure even after user access. With InterTrust technology, content is persistently protected and managed, regardless of its location.

A detailed competitive analysis of FlyingMedia to Adobe Web Buy/PDF Merchant and Xerox ContentGuard is available at http://www.intertrust.com/products/flyingmedia.

InterTrust also announced that it has signed an agreement to acquire Infinite Ink, a pioneering Portland, Oregon, provider of technology for multi-platform e-publishing. The integration of Infinite Ink’s technology into InterTrust’s DRM platform will provide e-publishers and resellers with a powerful range of platform support, document compression, advanced document rendering, and searching capabilities. InterTrust believes this combination of the leading distributed DRM and Infinite Ink’s leading e-technology for e-books will uniquely support digital content providers with easily used tools enabling DRM-powered digital products and business models. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

InterTrust initially plans to deliver MetaTrust Certified reusable e-publishing components that are based on Infinite Ink tools. These tools will operate on PCs, with follow-on support for set-tops, portables, other small platform devices, and Macintosh. Infinite Ink’s publishing tools are designed to take a source document and package the contents for rendering in the Infinite Ink IPD format. The packaging process automatically translates HTML, Open eBook format, and other formatted content into a compressed, rights-managed multimedia file. With Infinite Ink technology, document size is greatly reduced for significantly faster downloads and text searches, as well as smaller storage space requirements. In addition, a document and any portion of a document can have flexible rules associated to control viewing, printing, copying, and redistributing in accordance with content provider business models.

InterTrust intends to provide the Infinite Press Reader technology as a plug-in component for the InterTrust FlyingMedia DRM content publishing system. Publishers, resellers, and e-publishing companies will have a range of tools enabling creation of content in their desired or existing formats (PDF, HTML, Quark, MS Office) and publish them using an integrated array of technologies. According to the company, this integration of InterTrust and Infinite Ink technologies will produce highly efficient publishing tools that fully integrate advanced rights management and enable a rich variety of content business models, including integrated, multi-content products, superdistribution, flexible subscriptions, and value chain publishing. With Flying Media and Infinite Ink’s technology, publishers can plan on delivering highly scalable, multi-platform, multi-model solutions that have been designed to support the anticipated Open eBook industry format.

“Infinite Ink has exciting technology. Our acquisition of Infinite Ink should substantially expand InterTrust’s array of MetaTrust Certified components for content digital publishing. We believe that integration of Infinite Ink technology and InterTrust DRM technology will allow digital content providers to deploy comprehensive, seamless e-book solutions,” said Victor Shear, chairman and CEO of InterTrust Technologies Corp. “InterTrust is continually striving to ensure that consumers, publishers, resellers, and e-publishing companies have the broadest range of options available in designing and using high-quality DRM-enabled products, applications, and services.”

“As a result of our merger with InterTrust, we will work to seamlessly integrate our reader and publisher applications with the industry’s leading DRM solution,” said John Wiley, president of Infinite Ink. “The resulting trusted publishing components should substantially simplify and accelerate the development efforts of e-publishing and technology companies interested in exploiting highly-scalable and flexible DRM solutions.”

“Providing a solution that will be OEB-compliant should accelerate e-publishing market development,” said Dennis McNannay, vice president of product development at Infinite Ink. “This deal will create a single solution for securely managing, distributing, and consuming diverse media such as e-books, digital magazines, and newspapers, and music across multiple platforms.”

“The integration of Infinite Ink and InterTrust technology would offer publishers an easy and compelling transition to DRM,” said John Taysom, CEO of Reuters Greenhouse. “By allowing publishers to continue to publish in their existing formats and adding the sophistication of InterTrust’s DRM platform, we believe this solution will help publishers get to market quickly with advanced e-publishing business models.”

“E-publishing business strategies require multi-formats and multi-platforms,” said Arnie Sigurdsson, chief technology officer of Digital World Services, a Bertelsmann company. “We are very pleased to see the planned integration of emerging formats such as the Open eBook standard into the InterTrust DRM technology platform.”

“The business-information publishers that we are working with not only want to securely sell and distribute their content in electronic form, but also want a highly scalable electronic commerce solution,” said Kirk Loevner, founder and CEO of PublishOne. “The Infinite Ink acquisition will substantially enhance InterTrust’s DRM platform capabilities for publishers and represents an important step in the evolution of digital publishing.”

Source: InterTrust Technologies Corp., Santa Clara, CA, 800/393-2272; http://www.intertrust.com.


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