Media Wonk

Marking time - February 2, 2007

The Hollywood studios may be inching closer to making peace with peer-to-peer providers.

On Monday, the MPAA will join the Distributed Computing Industry Assn. and the Digital Watermarking Alliance in releasing on white paper on the potential to use watermarks to manage the flow of copyrighted content on P2P networks.

Don’t know yet whether the paper will make specific recommendations, but “working groups” of the three trade orgs have apparently been working on a general approach to the problem for several months.

The general idea is that standard watermarks could be inserted into movies and TV programming. P2P applications would then be designed to look for the marks and use them to filter out unauthorized content.

The presence of marked content on a network might also trigger a more rigorous DRM response that could either direct the user to an authorized site to buy the product or prevent playback.

The general idea isn’t knew. Watermark designers have been floating it for awhile, and the DWA is clearly the driving force behind the new white paper.

The fact that they got cooperation from the studios and P2P networks, though, is a new development, and suggests that the studios are perhaps coming around to letting their content roam a bit more freely on the Internet.

Details are expected to be announced Feb. 5 at a meeting of the Congressional Entertainment Caucus on Capitol Hill.

We’ll have a fuller report next week.

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