Английский язык: Аннотирование и реферирование текста

230 compress it for transmission and storage, and decompress it again for viewing and listening. The second is digital-rights management soft- ware, or DRM, which protects such content against piracy and unau- thorised copying. DRM allows the copyright holders of content – film studios and record companies, in essence – to define such parameters as when a film or song that is downloaded "expires", or how many times it can be copied to another device, such as a portable player. The trouble starts here, with a bewildering list of acronyms that no ordinary consumer should ever have to know, but currently needs to know, to set up a digital home. The Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) is an industry body that defines widely used codecs such as MPEG-2 for video and MP3 for audio. But the big vendors prefer their own codecs – Microsoft its WM9 (short for Windows-Media-9), Apple, the market leader in online music sales, its AAC, and so on. In DRM, the situation is even more chaotic. Microsoft pushes its Windows DRM; RealNetworks, which makes rival media software, has Helix; Sony has OpenMG; Apple likes FairPlay, and so on. The upshot is that consumers cannot mix online services, gadgets and software from different vendors and be sure that the content they have paid for actually works. Music bought online from Microsoft's MSN or Yahoo!, for instance, does not work on Apple's iTunes or iPod, and vice versa. This challenge is daunting because DRM technologies should not only be compatible today, but for all eternity. Otherwise, consumers will be afraid to pay for content, and will stick with CDs and DVDs, which seem painless and safe by comparison. "If consumers even know there's a DRM, what it is, and how it works, we've already failed," says Peter Lee, an executive at Disney. The same goes for codecs. "The user shouldn't know or care what format they're using, " says James Poder, an engineer at Comcast, America's largest cable company and broad- band internet service provider, because "consumers don't want to be IT administrators for their own home."