ContentGuard Awarded Five New Digital Rights Management Patents

Inventions Improve Protected Distribution of Enterprise Content and Composite Digital Works

BETHESDA, MD -- 12/20/2004 -- ContentGuard, Inc., a leading holder of Digital Rights Management (DRM) intellectual property, announced today that it has added five new DRM patents; one by the US Patent and Trademark Office, three by the European Patent Office and one by the Japanese Patent Office, to its broad patent portfolio.

The U.S. patent 6,824,051 describes a rights management system for managing the use of items by authorized users who are part of an access list.

The three patents issued by the European Patent Office, EP 1 335 260 B1, EP 1 335 261 B1, and EP 1 335 262 B1, cover the control of access to content with more than one part. Tailored usage rights may be created for different parts of the content and a user is permitted to access the respective parts of the content only in accordance with those usage rights. Patent 3610350 issued by the Japanese Patent Office concerns managing digital content within a transportable storage device in accordance with assigned usage rights.

“Authorized access lists are used in many types of digital distribution in the enterprise, as well as for content subscriptions,” said Michael Miron, CEO of ContentGuard. “With content distributors increasingly tailoring access rights according to content type, or even the specific chapter or song within this content, our new patents meet an emerging and important need. This provides further validation of ContentGuard’s pioneering work in creating DRM inventions that can be used globally by content distributors, device manufacturers and consumers to create new business models and expand the digital content market.”

ContentGuard intends to add these patents to its growing worldwide portfolio of more than 30 patents available for licensing by interested parties.

This summary of the new patents is a high level description provided for the convenience of the reader to generally indicate the subject matter of the patent. It is not a legal analysis of claims or a statement of any kind concerning the potential infringement of any claim of any patent by any DRM solution or other product or service. The summary is not intended for use in a legal proceeding and is not intended to and does not interpret or limit the scope or meaning of the patents or their claims.

About ContentGuard

ContentGuard, Inc. is an inventor of technologies and intellectual property for digital rights management and the persistent, authorized use of any digital resources. It is helping to expand the market for digital content by developing new technologies, intellectual property and tools for DRM, and driving the adoption of industry standards. ContentGuard licenses patented technologies, which cover broad, fundamental elements of DRM and distributed authorization. Launched in April 2000, ContentGuard conducts its operations in Bethesda, MD, and El Segundo, CA. The company is owned by Time Warner, Inc., and Microsoft Corporation with Xerox Corporation holding a small equity interest. Thomson will become a strategic investor in ContentGuard. For more information, about ContentGuard and its DRM technology please visit www.contentguard.com.

ContentGuard is a registered trademark of ContentGuard Holdings, Inc. All other company and product trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Contact Information

Gina Giachetti

Media Contact

Text100 for ContentGuard, Inc.

Contact via E-mail