On June 17, the Cato Institute sponsored an event that focused on P2P and copyright law. The Distributed Computing Industry Association (DCIA) took part in this event and, once again, demonstrated that their sole desire is to turn the FastTrack network into a pay service.

DCIA CEO Marty Lafferty tried to cozy up to the MPAA during this event by encouraging the MPAA to work with FastTrack to distribute their content. “Mr. Valenti, end the major studio boycott of peer-to-peer. Urge your members to work with us to counter copyright infringement and commercially develop file sharing to its full potential.”, said Lafferty. Lafferty then went on to say, “We do not agree with those who claim that 'swapping movies and music 'without compensating rights holders 'doesn't really hurt anybody’.

It seems that the DCIA is now parroting the same propaganda the RIAA has been spewing concerning file sharing hurting rights holders. It’s clear that they are against the free exchange of information and want to capitalize on their large, but shrinking user base before its too late.

Lafferty went on to say, “DCIA Members Digital Containers, Clickshare, and SVC are adding even more advanced digital rights management and new commerce engines to further distance P2P from the old-architecture centralized download sites favored by the music industry. Our Members Relatable, Predixis, and Shared Media Licensing (SML), are working to address unprotected files entered by consumers into P2P distribution.”

He then went on to propose the following steps:

- Entertainment content inventory (using Relatable software to create
and monitor a fingerprint and file-metatag database).

- Rights holder registry (comprising all interests for each piece of
content, where multiple parties are entitled to remuneration).

- Content verification (matching acoustic IDs with rights holder data to enable revenue allocation -- and the option to have high-quality files supplant inferior ones).

- Rules application (addressing allowable content usage, SML-based user
incentives, and benefit considerations).

- Digital rights management (adding encryption and licensing-features
for open format copies of identified content).

- And payment services (facilitating a range of user-fee collection and
content-provider payment options, from per-unit to actuarial).