4C Entity

Consortium of IBM, Intel, Panasonic (Matsushita), and Toshiba, formed in 1999 "to address the interoperability challenge of sharing premium content" (its own white paper, Tier 1, sha256 ce2baad3...). Its content-protection scheme, CPRM, was proposed for standardization into the ATA/IDE hard-drive command set in 2000–2001 — a fight the vault has only sourced to Tier 2–3 so far — and later shipped in SD cards as the SDSD-CPRM extension (2007).

References

• claim-4c-entity-cprm-proposal-bound-content-to-specific-ata-drive
• claim-ibm-withdrew-2001-cprm-ata-proposal-resubmitted-as-generic-functionality
• claim-t13-rejected-generic-functionality-proposal-april-2001-supermajority-rule
• Captures: 10-inbox/raw/2026-07-30-what-exactly-did-the-4c-entitys-cprm-proposal.md