SafeNet has announced that it is providing an OMA DRM 2.0 solution to China's CCTV for Internet video of the Beijing Summer Olympics. The client software is for Windows PCs (not mobile handsets) and is made available as a small software download. CCTV decided to use SafeNet's technology for the Olympics after trials with soccer broadcasts earlier this year.

This may be the most important DRM announcement of the year thus far. For SafeNet itself, it represents the integration of the OMA DRM technology that the company acquired earlier this year from Beep Science of Norway with the multi-DRM and content management server technology that it acquired from DMDSecure three years ago.

But the announcement is far more important than that, for two reasons. First, it is a new lease on life for OMA DRM 2.0, an open DRM standard that is much more powerful and flexible than its predecessor, OMA DRM 1.0, which is very widely installed on handsets globally. We gave OMA DRM 2.0 up for dead a while ago, when it seemed that the only actual production deployment of it was in a small music service in Switzerland that launched in 2005. Moreover, it validates SafeNet's purchase of Beep Science, which we saw as risky because Beep's only product was OMA DRM technology.

Secondly, a sporting event of this magnitude - the last one before the Beijing Olympics was the 2006 Soccer World Cup - is a rich prize for any DRM vendor. But when the country is China, and the customer is China's state-run broadcaster (and the sole authorized Internet and mobile carrier of Olympic audiovisual content), the significance is that much greater. The West has long been trying to get China to take intellectual property more seriously than it does now. CCTV's use of DRM for its own very high profile content is a tacit acknowledgement that the shoe is on the proverbial other foot; it should send a signal both within China and to the rest of the world that China considers IP to be worth protecting.