With NBC-Microsoft-Turner Broadcasting veteran Marty Lafferty leading them, a peer-to-peer lobby group called the Distributed Computing Industry Association launched itself this week to wield a little muscle on Capitol Hill as well to help set up some elementary business practices for the controversial but popular online industry.
Sharman Networks and Altnet – the former the parent of Kazaa, now the Internet's largest P2P file swap network; the latter its key partner – formed the DCIA with a June 30 meeting in Los Angeles that was said to have included representatives from two unidentified music labels, according to CBS Marketwatch.
The DCIA, said Lafferty in a press release, wants to set "common ground in promoting opportunity for digital media content distribution." Not surprisingly, the Recording Industry Association of America, which has been battling the P2P community up to and including litigation, scoffed at the group's forming.
"It seems odd that corporations who purposely facilitate illegal activity for a living are opening a Washington office to advocate their right to do so," said spokeswoman Amy Weiss in a statement. "This is apparently a reaction to the interest of Congress in the rampant piracy, security and privacy concerns arising from abuse of peer-to-peer networks."
Tell it to Grokster president Wayne Rosso, who said the point isn't to eliminate copyright protection, and whose P2P network was held not liable for copyright infringement in a recent federal court decision.
"Once the decision came down, [the P2P firms] realized, 'Hey, we can come out of the cold now -- we're legal,'" Rosso told NewsFactor.com. "We realized that we had been tarred and feathered on Capitol Hill unopposed for years, and the congressmen have been fed a lot of misinformation. On the money end, we can't compete with the RIAA and the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America), but we can compete with them in terms of number of voters."
The court ruling held that Grokster and Streamcast are no different than videocassette and tape recorders that can be used to infringe copyrights, with the judge saying there were plenty enough "legitimate" uses for Grokster and Streamcast and other P2P swap networks that they shouldn't be deemed strictly as copyright swappers.
But the DCIA probably shouldn't count on lobbying wins soon, according to analyst Ryan Jones at the Yankee Group, a Boston-based technology research and analysis firm. Jones told NewsFactor.com the DCIA was "bringing a knife to a gunfight," given that the record industry professionals had longer establishment in the Washington milieu.
