The Distributed Computing Industry Association’s new P2P content ...

P2P Media Summit next month, held concurrently with CES in Las Vegas, describing the preliminary work of the content group. Its goal is to give a technological boost to the distribution of licensed content over P2P networks, building on the association’s earlier digital watermarking working group, in which the MPAA participated but which never got around to field testing, Lafferty said. The association’s P4P Working Group, in which ISPs worked with P2P software makers to more efficiently route P2P transfers and reduce their bandwidth load, has impressed the content industry, he said. Following the Supreme Court’s verdict in MGM v. Grokster, “there was no possibility of really working on things together, but after that things have gradually thawed and improved” between the P2P and content industries. “It’s all about building trust,” Lafferty said, noting that it took the association three years to get ISP participation. The content group’s approach will focus on prioritizing delivery of licensed content over P2P, not penalizing the unlicensed traffic that comprises the vast majority of transfers on open P2P networks, he said. The Isle of Man is involved because its government is offering financial incentives for companies to deploy advanced network infrastructure there. But the government has also talked to the association about experimenting with new regulatory frameworks for copyright in the context of a distribution system without a traditional server-client relationship, Lafferty said. The Isle of Man could serve as a “crucible” for regulatory frameworks that could be adopted in other countries. The plan is to merge the work of the P4P and content groups once the latter has some results to show from field tests, he said.