November 16, 2004

Music Download and File Swapping

In another sign of the music industry's grudging embrace of file-swapping technology, Universal Music Group has agreed to license its 150,000-song catalog to Snocap, a San Francisco company started by Napster founder Shawn Fanning.

Posted on Tue, Nov. 16, 2004



File-swap firm gets license to sell music

UNIVERSAL DEALS WITH FANNING'S SNOCAP SERVICE

By Dawn C. Chmielewski

Mercury News


In another sign of the music industry's grudging embrace of file-swapping technology, Universal Music Group has agreed to license its 150,000-song catalog to Snocap, a San Francisco company started by Napster founder Shawn Fanning.

Snocap, which has been operating in stealth mode for more than a year, will provide the technology to let listeners buy music legally distributed over Internet file-sharing networks.

The Snocap service is expected to make its debut in early December, sources confirm. And Mashboxx, a new file-swapping service to be powered by Snocap, is expected to make its debut in January, according to industry sources. News of the deal was first reported by the Wall Street Journal on Monday.

A Snocap spokeswoman declined to comment on the arrangement with Universal.

The licensing agreement is another sign of the music industry's evolving position toward file-swapping. To date, Hollywood has failed in its attempt to use the courts and technological countermeasures to quash illegal downloading of copyrighted songs on Kazaa and other file-sharing networks.

And so last month, Sony Music BMG, the world's largest music company, acknowledged it was in licensing discussions with the industry's most caustic critic, Wayne Rosso, former president of file-sharing service Grokster.

Rosso is behind the new Mashboxx file-sharing service to be powered by Snocap.

Snocap embodies Fanning's quest to legitimize Internet file-swapping, pioneered by Napster in 1999. Snocap's technology gives file-sharing networks the tools to know exactly what files people are looking for and what they're offering to share.

It can identify each song by its acoustic properties or ``fingerprint'' and then wrap each tune in a set of licensing rules, determined in advance by the artist or label. Such rules, for example, could allow a person to listen to the song for free or let them listen to it for a set number of days before they are required to purchase it.

The Universal deal gives Snocap a license to sell its catalog of 150,000 songs through file-swapping networks. But Universal won't allow its music to be distributed on services that don't use some sort of filtering to remove bootleg songs. That would apparently preclude Snocap's deployment on existing Internet file-swapping services such as eDonkey, Kazaa, Morpheus or Limewire.

EDonkey President Sam Yagan said he is reluctant to use a service such as Snocap because of the potential privacy implications of software that monitors every file traversing a network.

He said he also is worried he would expose his service to legal challenge if he agreed to start filtering content. That's because the recording industry could argue that file-swapping services can control the illegal exchange of music on their networks.

``The labels are saying they want to experiment, which is great,'' he added. ``But the one experiment they refuse to do is to try selling paid-for content next to free content.''


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Posted by Craig at November 16, 2004 08:20 PM