WASHINGTON — Amid the recent collapse of talks over the Induce Act in Congress, record labels are closing in on deals to enable several new peer-to-peer services to emerge — with the sanction of major record labels that have so far derided P2P as a haven for piracy.
At a panel held Wednesday by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington, at least one record industry representative predicted that such sanctioned P2P services will start to proliferate in the next several months.
“We are going to see three or four of these in the very, very near future,” said Mitch Glazier, senior vice president of government relations and legislative counsel at the Recording Industry Association of America.
Glazier said the new services will be consumer-friendly and enable the portability that digital music consumers demand, all without running afoul of copyright law. “P2P technology is great,” Glazier said. “It can be harnessed for good or harnessed for bad.”
After the panel, Glazier told Wired News that it’s still unclear whether consumers will be willing to pay for P2P services, but companies such as Wurld Media and Snowpack are trying to wrap up deals with various record labels to try out new service models.
Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), the chief sponsor of the Induce Act, has praised such companies as the exception to so-called bad actors like Grokster and Morpheus, which he and the content industry charge are inducing people to violate copyrights.
Hatch, along with Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), initially introduced the Inducing Infringement of Copyrights Act (SB2560) in June. But the tech, consumer electronics and internet industries opposed the bill, fearing it could suffocate innovation across multiple sectors by broadly criminalizing the creation of products that could “induce” copyright violations.
Talks between the content and tech camps to draft a compromise version of the Induce Act crumbled earlier this month.
Experts are starting to wonder whether content owners and the technology community will ever be able to agree on how to treat P2P networks.
Adam Thierer, the Cato Institute’s director of telecommunications studies, said after the panel that both sides seem as far apart as ever.
“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,” he said. “This is one of them.”
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