Well, if this won't make publishers wake up to DRM, I don't know what will. eWeek reports on Microsoft's upcoming release of Windows Media Player 10 that will incorporate the so-called Janus digital rights management technology. Key to the development of this technology is that the DRM scheme itself is device-centric and platform independent, meaning that your friendly Linux computer and other devices will be able to take advantage of the rights scheme to manage access control. Enhanced features will include the ability to have rights time out - a la library/rentals - and to support subscription streaming services. Details still to follow and devices taking advantage of this technology won't be around until the fall, but it appears to be a very thoroughly thought-out strategy that will finally provide something approaching a universal DRM capability for a broad array of content that will allow digital objects to have a high degree of portability and reuse capabilities. Obviously media-oriented companies will be jumping on this aggressively, but aggregators and publishers that have relied on controlled database access as their primary revenue protection scheme will discover fairly rapidly that this type of scheme will provide them with the best of both worlds: the ability to control revenues while placing content in a wide variety of contexts. Devil's in the details, though: we'll keep on top of this.