'I think it's inevitable we'll be sued:' OpenCOLA
DAVID AKIN
Financial Post - Wednesday, August 2, 2000

Peter J. Thompson, National Post Grad Conn, OpenCOLA chief executive, in his office.

LAS VEGAS - A Toronto software development firm is being courted by top-tier U.S. venture capital companies that are keen to invest in a new way for Internet users to produce, find and share multimedia content.

OpenCOLA Inc. will soon open an office in Silicon Valley and expects, shortly after that, to close a second round of financing as it races to take the lead in the development of peer-to-peer Internet applications.

With peer-to-peer applications, Internet users need not use a central Web site or directory to share multimedia content. Instead, information is shared through a decentralized architecture in which files are exchanged directly from each user's computer.

One of the problems, though, with peer-to-peer applications is finding information. OpenCOLA has developed the OpenCOLA application protocol, a new method of allowing Internet users to locate and find other users who have a common set of interests.

Users are directed to other users whose content is "relevan" for their own uses.

Earlier this year, OpenCOLA, formerly known as Steelbridge Inc., received US$2-million in first round funding through Mosaic Venture Partners Inc. to develop this technology and new applications that can take advantage of the application protocol.

Last weekend at DefCon, the annual hacker convention here, OpenCOLA released an early version of COLAVision, a system to let users find and broadcast music and video files on the Internet.

COLAVision is in the same product category as other music and video file-sharing systems such as Napster or Gnutella, but with some key differences, the most notable of which is the OpenCOLA's ability to measure relevance as well as its careful effort to avoid presenting its product as a tool for those who wish to trade illegally copied music and video files.

"I think it's inevitable we'll be sued just because we're in the same zone [as Napster] but we're taking precautions," said Laird Brown, OpenCOLA's information chief. "We're working very carefully with several California lawyers to advise us on our strategy."

Napster Inc., which provides a service in which users of Napster software can exchange MP3 music files, avoided a court-ordered shutdown of its service late last week with a last minute reprieve. The Recording Industry Association of America alleges that Napster's service is designed to facilitate the exchange of copyright-protected music files.

COLAVision allows users to broadcast music or video files they create or find elsewhere on the Web. But, in a bid to avoid the wrath of the RIAA and the Motion Picture Association of America, COLAvision's promotional literature contains this phrase: "Don't make a fool's mistake. You're only allowed to broadcast content you own or have permission to broadcast. COLAVision is not intended to be the killer piracy app."

Nonetheless, there is the potential that COLAVision users will broadcast illegally obtained or copied content. With that in their minds, the company has promised that a future version of COLAVision will take advantage of Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Media Rights Manager, which incorporates some rights-protection features.

The company is also stressing that COLAVision is an enabling technology, in that it gives multimedia, film, and music developers the opportunity to broadcast content on the Web and more easily find an audience interested in that content.

"We decided that we wanted to democratize the broadcast environment, to encourage independent artists and facilitate community content production,"

Grad Conn, OpenCOLA's chief executive, said.: "Anyone with Internet access will be able to tell their own stories, to broadcast who they are to the rest of the world."

The venture capital community, though, is excited less about COLAVision than it is about some underlying technology used to create it. "Where we're at is a very, very hot space," Mr. Brown said.

Peer-to-peer applications can evaluate the worth and value of the content produced by and stored on the computers of various users. The OpenCOLA protocol helps users find information that matches a given set of interests by comparing one users set of interest with all the other sets of interests of other users.

Users who are interested in French Canadian folk music would be matched with others of similar interests while those interested in the films of Fellini would be matched with each other. In this way, users of COLAvision do not necessarily need to know the names of artists or titles of works in order to find them.

OpenCOLA, which has about 35 employees, believes this kind of system will make it easier for independent works to find a new audience.

OpenCOLA released COLAVision primarily to demonstrate the value of its protocol. It hopes that other developers will incorporate the protocol in other applications.

To that end, COLAVision, like the OpenCOLA protocol, is being released under the open source licence, so that other developers may examine the source computer code and improve upon it or modify it.