Re: Digital Talking Book Standard

["Martin G. McCormick" <martin@dc.cis.okstate.edu>]

	I certainly hope that players for DTB's will be available
for Linux when the technology actually begins to bear fruit.

	This truly is a wonderful next step in the Talking Book
program. Just think of the logistical problems of moving and
caring for physical materials that this solves.  There will still
need to be traditional Talking Books for many years to come, but
I think this is the future and it may get to a point where there
won't need to be as many physical recordings produced as there
are now.

	The one thing I see as holding things up is the one
artificial technical issue and that is DRM or Digital Rights
Management.

	How is that going to be accomplished?  The standards
document simply says that digital rights management will be
supported but probably wisely does not prescribe exactly what
sort of mechanism will be used.

	Hopefully, being eligible to receive traditional Talking
Books and Braille materials will enable one to also receive any
DTB's they are entitled to receive.

	In the main-stream consumer world, digital rights
management has not been doing too well.  Some systems are hacked
almost before they are released.  Other systems tend to do the
opposite and malfunction in ways their developers never thought
of to cause honest users of the technology to be denied service.

	Some rights management systems have even gained the
distinction of suffering from both maladies.  The crackers
de fang the protection and the honest users discover that the
software thinks they are thieves because of something their
equipment or they accidentally did.

	This issue, not technology, has held up everything from
digital audio tape a decade or so ago to present-day high-definition
television systems.

	Linux and FreeBSD should actually be good test beds for
this technology because it is based on open-source models and any
hanky panky mechanisms such as back doors or scripting
applications are a little easier to police than they are in
proprietary operating systems.

Martin McCormick WB5AGZ  Stillwater, OK 
OSU Center for Computing and Information Services Network Operations Group