Xerox, Microsoft Team On Data Protection Company

Setting their sites on the emerging data protection market, industry giants Xerox Corp. and Microsoft Corp. have teamed to form a new, independent company called ContentGuard Inc., the companies announced today. ContentGuard will sell a suite of data protection products developed by Xerox at its Palo Alto Research Center that provide the "same kind of content protection in the digital world that you have in the printed press (arena)," Xerox spokesperson Bill McKee said today.

Xerox, which owns a majority stake in ContentGuard, enlisted the help Microsoft, which is a substantial minority owner of the new company, to promote the products and the programming language that accompanies them, McKee said.

At the core of the new product line is a new Internet language called XrML (extensible rights markup language), that Xerox contends will provide for unparalleled levels of data protection when used in conjunction with the ContentGuard product line.

McKee says that the ContentGuard products will allow content owners (artists and publishers, for example) to set and enforce terms of use for their text, audio, and video offerings.

"If I want to give you a one chapter preview only or let someone listen to a song 20 times," the ContentGuard software allows for that level of specificity, McKee said.

To that end, the ContentGuard products will get their first major public test drive when they are used by Microsoft in conjunction with the company's eBook initiative, McKee said.

ContentGuard is separate and semi-autonomous from Xerox. There is already discussion about taking the new firm public, although no timeline has been established, McKee said.

Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center or "PARC," where the ContentGuard products were developed is somewhat famous for being the birthplace of the computer mouse and several other innovations.

Further information about the ContentGuard services is located on the new firm's Web site at http://www.contentguard.com.

Reported by Newsbytes.com, http://www.newsbytes.com.