This has been around for a while, but I only got to it now: OMA – Open Mobile Alliance – earlier this month announced what the requirements for the DRM levy will be. That is, $1 per device *and* 1% of the transaction costs. That ought to upset one or two operators. Especially those who have scrapped their own DRM-development plans saying they are committed to OMA. I wonder how it feels to be hitched to them now?

While the percentage may not sound much, the concept of yet another player squeezing revenue out of digital content sales is not very nice. Who do we have there now? Operators, naturally. Looking to keep the ridiculous cuts of their current premium-SMS-driven content business, they are likely to end up getting a pretty big chunk of each transaction. If you have a payment systems supplier, they’re going to get a cut. Happen to pay with a credit card or direct bank transfer one way or another? There goes another small slice. More likely than not you have some kind of a content aggregator sharing the revenue also. Oh yeah, and someone would probably need to give the actual content creators something as well. And now we add the DRM patent owners to the mess? Great.

Of course, one would be tempted to say that DRM-schemes are born dead anyway… ;) Let’s see where the negotiations take this story, though.