Intertrust's Talal Shamoon: Trust me.

Putting content online is a risky game. You could win an audience measured in the millions and lose control of your work to pirates. Slapping a digital padlock on content could protect you. But it could also turn off consumers altogether.

Talal Shamoon, chief executive of Intertrust Technologies in Sunnyvale, Calif., believes he has an answer. Intertrust holds a treasure trove of patents that help content owners manage digital rights; it has spent five years and tens of millions of dollars developing a standard called Marlin, which aims to keep content secure in a way that legitimate consumers won't find offensive. Now all he has to do is convince telecom providers, gadgetmakers and consumers that his plan will help them--and that it keeps content under their control, not his.Marlin is already hitting its stride in Asia. In Japan it's a national requirement that Marlin be included in Internet-enabled televisions. Sony ( SNE - news - people ) scrapped a homegrown digital rights management standard in favor of using Marlin to deliver and protect downloadable movies and television shows through its PlayStation Network.

But DRM has been a hard sell in the U.S. Devicemakers resent forking over licensing fees for digital locks and keys. Consumers chafe at being told where to use a song or movie and how to operate their gadgets. Pundits argue that by managing how online content gets used, DRM thwarts innovation and market forces. The result has been a patchwork quilt of DRM schemes, each with its own set of rules and privileges.

Intertrust, which was taken private in 2003 by a joint venture that includes Sony and Philips, already wields much power, by dint of its of 80 U.S. patents around "trusted computing," a way of getting computer systems to work together securely. (DRM is a subset of trusted computing.) It has another 144 U.S. patents pending. Outside of the U.S. the company holds 57 patents (and 150 pending). It has a mere dozen or so customers, including Nokia ( NOK - news - people ) and Samsung, but it harvests an estimated $100 million a year in licensing revenues. With a staff of 44, Intertrust enjoys a pretax profit margin that Microsoft ( MSFT - news - people ) would envy, in the neighborhood of 90%.

"They're an interesting case," says analyst Michael McGuire, who specializes in digital rights management for Gartner, a technology research firm. "A lot of people in the industry don't like them because they have so much intellectual property."