There are some omitted details in your article which I would like to take this opportunity to clarify.

DRM goes to great effort to differentiate itself from iBiquity and portray itself as an altruistic, non profit organization. In reality, there are not many differences between the two organizations except for their business structure and methods of collecting royalties. The end results are the same in both cases.

While it is true that the DRM Consortium is a non commercial organization, its members include the for-profit companies who make money selling DRM’s technology. These makers of DRM products in turn pay patent royalties to the DRM licensors, who include such commercial companies as AT&T, Dolby Laboratories, France Telecom, Fraunhofer, NEC, Panasonic, Sony and Thomson.

iBiquity’s broadcaster business model which was mentioned in the article does not apply outside of the United States. In the rest of the world, iBiquity does not charge license fees to radio stations for the use of its broadcast technology. Our business model elsewhere in the world is the same as DRM’s – we simply collect a fee from the manufacturers who use our technology. This is the same business model used by most technology products today. The costs are eventually passed down to the end users, but the final costs of the products are determined by free market competition. iBiquity collects royalty fees directly from the manufacturers. In DRM’s case, royalties are collected by a third party patent pool administrator, as described at http://www.vialicensing.com/licensing/DRM_fees.cfm.

With regard to the concept of an “open standard”, most of the technical aspects of both technologies are in fact fully documented and available to the public. The HD Radio documentation is available on line at http://www.nrscstandards.org/download.asp?file=NRSC-5-B.asp.

Thank you for this opportunity to clarify these issues.

John Schneider
iBiquity Digital Corporation