A lobbying group for file-sharing networks made an incremental step
this week in its effort to help Members build an acceptable peer-to-peer
(P2P) computer system when it announced that the law firm Alston & Bird had
joined its Membership.
The firm has expressed an interest in helping Members of the
Distributed Computing Industry Association (DCIA)
involved in creating its P2P Revenue Engine project with obtaining patents,
said Marty Lafferty, DCIA's chief executive officer.
Alston & Bird hosted a meeting of DCIA Member and non-member companies
last week in New York. Led by Les Ottolenghi, president of INTENT MediaWorks
of Atlanta, the group of technology companies discussed the implementation
of the revenue engine, which is an anti-piracy, content tracking and
micro-payment system being proposed by the DCIA as a technical solution to
the problem of entertainment piracy on file-sharing networks.
Ottolenghi said the group hopes to have its project operational by next
summer. Lafferty said the plan is to develop the project in phases, with a
new stage of the project being deployed every two months until a
commercially viable system is ready to roll by the end of next summer. Aydin
Caginalp, an Alston & Bird partner and entertainment and media transactions
lawyer in the firm's New York office, was unavailable to comment on the
firm's involvement by press time. Caginalp has worked for several years on
many business deals for the global media giant Bertelsmann which owns more
than 200 music labels.
The technology companies involved have reached the final planning
stages for the project, Lafferty said. Participants include Relatable, which
will provide the "acoustic fingerprinting" technology that will be used to
identify and track music that is uploaded to the P2P networks by consumers;
Digital Containers and Shared Media Licensing will provide anti-piracy
technologies; and Clickshare Service and P2P Cash will provide micro-payment
technologies.
Ottolenghi's company, INTENT MediaWorks, will provide marketing and
reporting services. eDonkey will be the pilot file-sharing network
participating in the project.
In the past few years, the heads of the major file-sharing networks
have complained that the recording labels will not license their music
catalogs across their networks. The recording companies have countered that
they do not want to license their legitimate, copyrighted content alongside
illegally pirated content on the P2P networks.
"What we're trying to do is to make it attractive for the labels to
work with us," Lafferty said.
He said while independent labels and artists are happy to participate
in such a project, the major labels have yet to sign on. Asked whether any
of them had expressed any interest in the P2P Revenue Engine, Lafferty
declined to comment.
