There's at least one music industry representative who thinks the day is coming when the music business just might sanction one or several new peer-to-peer services – in spite of the industry's so far customary stance of painting P2P as a pirate shipping line.
"We are going to see three or four of these in the very, very near future," said Recording Industry of America senior vice president for government relations Mitch Glazier, after a discussion panel conducted October 20 by the Cato Institute, a libertarian-oriented think tank. "P2P technology is great," Glazier said. "It can be harnessed for good or harnessed for bad."
Glazier said such services would be user friendly and heavy on the portability while avoiding the kind of copyright law issues that got P2P and its users in an uproar and a defensive posture. He admitted that it remains unclear whether consumers would be willing to pay for P2P but that at least two companies – Wurld Media and Snowpack – are looking to secure deals with several record labels to try new models, according to Wired.
The Cato panel dealt with the so-called Induce Act, drawn up to criminalize products and technologies that "induce" copyright infringement, and the court decisions that likely inspired the legislation, decisions that Grokster and Morpheus – two of the world's most popular P2P programs – could not be held liable for copyright infringement based on what the programs' users were doing with the programs. A bid to craft a compromise version of the bill fell apart in the Senate earlier this month.
And in spite of such encouraging sounding remarks as those of Grazier, there isn't likely to be any hard deal-making between the music and film worlds and the tech worlds any time soon, according to Cato director of telecommunications studies Adam Thierer, who organized and moderated the panel discussion.
"I don't care how long you lock everyone in a room and tell them to try to strike a deal, there are just some copyright issues where compromise proves impossible," Thierer said following up the discussion. "This is one of them."
The Motion Picture Association of America's representative on the panel agreed. "I think the State Department calls them 'spirited,'" said vice president and counsel for technology David Green afterward. "Everyone who was in the room wanted to get out of the room as soon as possible."
The good news also included both sides acknowledging they could at least begin defining sticking points, as Wired put it, but Public Knowledge president Gigi Sohn told the magazine the content owners' proposed language "remains far too broad" for any kind of consensus to come forth very soon. And Sohn also said there's that little matter of the content owners' alleged history of broken promises when it comes to threatening litigation, weighed against their stated promises to use the Induce Act against P2P only and not devices like the iPod or TiVo digital recorder.
"Despite the promises of 'oh, no, we won't sue you,' history has proven otherwise," she told the magazine.
