LOS ANGELES, Jan. 20 (Xinhuanet) -- Four leading consumer electronics companies announced Thursday that have have formed an alliance to use a common method to fight digital music and video piracy.

    Japan's Sony Corp and Panasonic-brand owner Matsushita ElectricIndustrial, South Korea's Samsung Electronics and Dutch Philips Electronics formed the alliance so buyers of their products could watch or listen to "appropriately licensed video and music on any device, independent of how they originally obtained that content,"they said in a joint statement.

    The alliance, called the Marlin Joint Development Association (Marlin JDA), gives the companies standard specifications to build DRM functions into their devices that support commonly used modes of content distribution.

    Currently, the companies do not have any cooperation in sellingdigital products. For example, songs bought from Sony's Connect store on the Internet can only be played on portable music playersfrom Sony or companies that license its digital rights management (DRM) system.

    Different music stores have different digital encoding and decoding formats for the songs they sell. Apple uses AAC in its iTunes Music Store and Microsoft using Windows Media. The lack of interoperability slows down the success of digital entertainment and the sales of players.

    If they do not offer their own protection system, as Sony does,the consumer electronics makers have to choose sides and license someone's DRM system for inclusion into products.

    "(This) promotes interoperability while maximizing efficiency (when creating new products)," the companies said in a statement.

    Intertrust Technologies, a small United States-based company which owns many of the crucial patents for digital anti-piracy protection, is also part of the alliance. The technology can be used in all products that get their content via the Internet, broadcast or mobile phone networks.

    A first version is expected to come out by the summer of 2005, and it will support another, longer-term initiative, called Coral,which is aimed at developing a set of DRM-neutral agreements to ensure interoperability between all DRM systems and standards. Enditem