
We were rooting round the UK’s Intellectual Property Office website this week, and found an interesting patent filed by Omnifone on 4 February, for a ‘Method of Providing Digital Rights Management for Music Content by Means of a Flat-Rate Subscription’. The abstract describes mobile applications allowing users to browse and search music content on a remote server, download songs over the wireless network, and then play them on the device – with DRM wrapped around it to ensure that only people paying a flat-rate subscription can play the tracks. It’ll be interesting to see if they get it – and what happens next if they do… Source: UK Intellectual Property Office