Forbes on Intertrust and Digital Rights Management

Posted by Ken Y-N on August 18th, 2009 at 03:03pm

There was recently a fascinating article on Intertrust and their business model published in Forbes. Intertrust have always been on interest to me (at one point I was very close to asking them for a job when I was working on a joint venture that involved them) so I enjoyed reading this interview with Talal Shamoon, their CEO.

Intertrust hold a lot of patents in the DRM field and are big in Marlin, a standard for content protection on internet-ready televisions in Japan. The article mentions they have been granted 80 US patents (and have another 144 pending) related to Trusted Computing, which it describes thusly:

80 U.S. patents around "trusted computing," a way of getting computer systems to work together securely. (DRM is a subset of trusted computing.)

I think my regular readers can spot quite a number of things inaccurate or glossed over in that description!

Regardless, they have a number of licensees of their intellectual property, bringing in about $100 million per year with a staff of 44 and a 90% profit margin.

I’d love to say more, but I’ve been involved, and still am involved, in many of the issues mentioned in the article, so it would be politic to keep quiet!

Tags: drm, forbes, intertrust, marlin

Under Advocacy Tags: drm, forbes, intertrust, marlin