The Distributed Computing Industry Association (DCIA) proposed digital watermarking as a solution help the entertainment industry protect copyright content. The DCIA is a trade group with 72 members, including P2P developers, other technology providers, and entertainment and content owners.

From the press release: "Digital watermarking, in the case of file-sharing environments, is the process by which imperceptible data is integrated into content during post-production that enables identification of such content as it is being redistributed. Successful commercial deployments of watermarked-based systems by the music, movie, and advertising industries have already had a significant impact on pre-release infringement and monitoring/reporting accuracy."

The intent of the DCIA iniative is to have copyright producers watermark their content and P2P developers voluntarily program their software to look for and filter out files with the marks. The effort has been championed by watermark technology company Digimarc.

Watermarking is a good technology that certainly can help. But I believe this balloon will just be ignored like other promising ideas and lead nowhere.

Watermarking doesn't address the millions of songs and movies already produced. It won't work with non-compliant software and devices. So it's oriented only to major P2P software that would be compliant.

The entertainment industry has already won the P2P technology fight. Grokster is in hibernation and converting. Morpheus is likely to follow. Others with cease & desist letters are transitioning to authorized usage or exiting the market. The major labels and studios have neither incentive nor need to resort to incomplete technology when the legal stick has worked so effectively.