Digital Home Thoughts: Napster Creator Touts Legal File Sharing

"Shawn Fanning's Napster software enabled countless music fans to swap songs on the Internet for free, turning him into the recording industry's enemy No. 1 in the process. Five years later, now heading San Francisco-based Snocap Inc., Fanning is touting a new technology designed to help the music companies who once sued him into submission cash in on file-sharing between computer users, also known as peer-to-peer. Rough details of the venture, in the works the past four years, surfaced in recent weeks, but Fanning spoke publicly about it for the first time Thursday, hailing it as a means to create a licensed online music service with the nearly unlimited selection of music now available on file-sharing networks."



SNOCAP enables record labels and individual artists to make the full depth of their catalogs available through authorized peer-to-peer networks and online retailers. Even with all the songs currently available on iTunes and the WMA stores, there are plenty of songs that seem only available on the peer-to-peer networks. The technology is here to turn the current DRM solutions on end and if successful, this could remove the power from Apple and Microsoft and put it back in to the studios hands.