p2pnet.net News:- Nazi propaganda minister Josef Goebbels’ most memorable principle was: no matter big a lie may be, if it’s repeated often enough, it becomes the truth.

Through their RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America), over and over again, the labels hammer the message that anyone who downloads, uploads or shares digital music is a criminal and that the activity is illegal.

That’s nonsense, of course. But the Goebbels maxim is something the Big Five record labels heartily subscribe to. And it works for them, often with the able and enthusiastic assistance of many members of the mainstream press.

Now lawyer John Frankenheimer is implying there are no legitimate p2p services.

He’s co-chairman of Loeb & Loeb which is being sued for $25 million by Steven Seagal’s former producing partner, who’s alleging malpractice and breach of fiduciary duty.

Giving the “boldest public P2P prediction to date at the recent Billboard Music & Money Symposium,” Frankenheimer said he expects “legitimate P2P services to be a reality within the next year,” reports a Reuters story on a Billboard Music & Money Symposium here.

And, “It’s within the realm of possibility,” one major-label technology expert says of the timetable. “I think you’ll see both happen.”

In the meanwhile, FreePeers (BearShare), Manolito P2P (Blubster), LimeWire (Limewire), Grokster Ltd (Grokster), MetaMachine (eDonkey2000) and Streamcast Networks (Morpheus) are legitimate American companies operating p2p services.

They’ve been trying for years to get a dialogue going with the corporate music industry.

However, the stumbling block is: their plan is about making p2p work for everyone – that’s to say the p2p companies and members of the file sharing community – and not just Big Music.

Back to the Billboard propaganda meeting, “Details are limited on which companies have an eye on the legitimate market,” the story goes on. “Nor is it clear what the business model of a legal P2P offering would be. This much is known: The key to every commercial P2P distribution scenario is the inclusion of content-filtering technology.”

It might be more accurate to say that’s the key to the RIAA’s commercial scenario – not that Kazaa, with its singular approach to business, wouldn’t like a hand in it.

And on hand at the Music = Money symposium was the RIAA-sponsored ceo of Audible Magic who just happens to have piece of software he claims can “keep unlicensed files out of P2P environments, track content consumption on the network and facilitate transactions”.

Through their trade group, P2P United, the commercial p2p operators have been trying to get a look at this ‘filter’, vaunted at every opportunity by the RIAA and touted to congress by senior RIAA executives up to and including iceo Mitch Bainwol.

Interestingly, the report also mentions Snocap, a shadowy product being developed by Napster creator Shawn Fanning, who’s garnering a huge amount of advance publicity by saying absolutely nothing.

“Snocap has yet to launch, but the company is quietly demonstrating a similar solution to the major labels and others,” says the report.

But, “before the labels sign on for any commercial P2P concept, P2P network operators need to agree to rid their systems of unlicensed content,” says the Reuters piece.

Didn’t Frankenheimer say suggest there are no legitimate P2P services?

Anyway, it seems “”P2P operators are also balking at suggestions that they build filtering technologies into their systems. The operators are concerned that such moves are the precursor to a legislative push by the entertainment industry to require P2P networks to use filtering technologies.”

This last is in reference to the infamous Lockyer/Stevenson letter prepared by California attorney general Bill Lockyer’s office and then edited by senior MPAA exeutive Vans Stevenson. The letter, or a version of it, will eventually reach AGs across the US.

“Legitimate peer-to-peer systems are possible today,” Sony Music Entertainment chief technology officer Phil Wiser says. “It really just comes down to whether these services are truly interested in going legitimate and are willing to implement a solution that does.”

However, it might be more accurate to say p2p is here and now and whether or not Hollywood’s various components can make it work for them depends on they’re able to abandon their outmoded business models and function in the digital age where consumers have a voice and where the enterainment industry no longer exerts total control.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 19th, 2004 at 7:01 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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