FATHER OF MP3 COMPANY Secure Digital Music Initiative, Executive Director AGE 46 ADDRESSwww.cselt.stet.it/leonardo BIO The man who unleashed the MP3 genie is now leading music-industry efforts to get
it back in the bottle. Chiariglione's crusade to create universal standards for
digital audio and video--he runs the Open Platform Initiative for Multimedia
Access--took a strange turn in February 1999, when he agreed to head the Secure
Digital Music Initiative (SDMI), a consortium of panicked record labels trying to
safeguard their old business model in the new age of downloadable music.
Chiariglione produced the first specs for "secure," copy-protected, portable
devices in a matter of months.
It's an ironic turn for Chiariglione, who in 1992 oversaw the research team that
set the standards for compressing digital audio into smaller, more manageable
file sizes known as MP3. At the time, no one thought about piracy protection
because there was no practical way of making and distributing copies--this was
before fast Internet connections and powerful PCs.
BEST LINE "By no means should sdmi be taken as the Trojan horse of the content
companies to deprive users of the benefit of this technology and the Internet. I
can tell you very firmly that the so-called garage band is one of the key
parameters in the sdmi specification."
FORWARD TILT First-generation sdmi-compliant players that play MP3s are supposed
to ship for the holidays.
