P2P Standardization processes differ from the traditional media standard process

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A good explanation from the Repositorium blog [1]/:


"Bill Rosenblatt accurately describes how media standardization worked in the analogue space:

Market leaders (content providers, service providers and device manufacturers) designed services for consumers, wrote the technical specifications and implemented the standards. Then it was up to the content providers’ blessings to license their content to service providers to be distributed on a technical platform.

However, successful standardisation works somewhat differently in the digital space:

For DMP “Standardisation is the process by which individuals recognise the advantage of all doing certain things in an agreed way and codify that agreement'. Within the DMP project individuals codify the agreement on how they see the world of DRM - as an interoperable DRM system.

The DMP recognizes the fact that in the digital space individual people can play roles that had been exclusively reserved to the big players from the media industry: Users can be content providers, service providers, network providers, device manufacturers, if necessary all in one.

The Internet was standardized in this spirit (e.g. through RFCs, W3C standards) and interoperability between Internet devices and services is a result of it. The licenses of the underlying source code prevented that the Internet was “embraced and extended' by major device manufacturers or service providers." (http://camorra.org/swann/2006/05/26/rosenblatts-analogue-thinking/)