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November 22, 2005, 11:37 AM ET
Imagining a Song-Swapping Utopia
Shawn Fanning—who started the war over file sharing when he designed the first version of Napster—now envisions a digital world where recording labels that want to sell songs online can post them for download, set a price, and let the marketplace do the rest. The key to such a community, he says, is a program called Snocap. The software, designed by Mr. Fanning, allows record companies to tag their songs and require file swappers to pay for the tunes if they try to download them illegally.
Snocap might sound promising to record executives, but there’s no guarantee the software will revolutionize song swapping. So far the only digital music service to embrace Mr. Fanning’s technology is Mashboxx, and that company comes with a bit of baggage: It is backed by Sony, whose experiments with intrusive copy-protection software have not endeared it to consumers. (The New York Times)
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