Napster creator Shawn Fanning's Snocap tracking system has nabbed yet another major deal, this time with Sony BMG. Snocap is a copyright management and filtering system that can allow P2P users swap songs legitimately over P2P networks. Fanning's Napster was shut down year ago after US judges said it was breaking copyright laws; the service was later re-launched as a legit online music download service. Snocap has already nabbed a deal with Universal and is in talks with EMI.
Snocap tracks the trading of legitimate songs, which in turn allows the labels to charge for the music. "The internet will become a much richer resource for music fans everywhere," said Shawn Fanning, commenting on the deal. "This is an important step toward the growth of a digital marketplace where consumers can discover, share and purchase music from massively deep, almost infinite catalogues."
Snocap is exactly what the major record labels were seeking; a way to turn P2P networks into very profitable tools for distributing music at low costs. Current legal music stores online require a lot of bandwidth to sell music downloads to customers while P2P has some advantages. One advantage with most P2P networks is they are generally more reliable. Imagine if the iTunes servers all went down for a few hours, that's thousands of songs that won't be sold and when the servers went down, imagine how many users ended up with incomplete downloads?
Terms of the Sony BMG deal were not disclosed, but the record label said it had already started to register its content with Snocap's copyright management interface. "Snocap's technology will help to curb copyright infringement, and will facilitate the creation of legitimate, authorised peer to peer services," said Thomas Hesse, president of Sony BMG's global digital business division, said in a statement. Mashboxx is planning to launch a service based on Snocap later this year.
Source:
BBC News
Snocap is exactly what the major record labels were seeking; a way to turn P2P networks into very profitable tools for distributing music at low costs. Current legal music stores online require a lot of bandwidth to sell music downloads to customers while P2P has some advantages. One advantage with most P2P networks is they are generally more reliable. Imagine if the iTunes servers all went down for a few hours, that's thousands of songs that won't be sold and when the servers went down, imagine how many users ended up with incomplete downloads?
Terms of the Sony BMG deal were not disclosed, but the record label said it had already started to register its content with Snocap's copyright management interface. "Snocap's technology will help to curb copyright infringement, and will facilitate the creation of legitimate, authorised peer to peer services," said Thomas Hesse, president of Sony BMG's global digital business division, said in a statement. Mashboxx is planning to launch a service based on Snocap later this year.
Source:
BBC News
