Shawn Fanning is back.
Few in the tech world need an introduction to Napster's founder, the college dropout whose revolutionary file-swapping technology shook the foundations of the $11bn record industry. But Fanning's celebrity -- which included an appearance on the cover of Time magazine -- got short-circuited when Napster found itself on the receiving end of a legal challenge by the recording industry. After a year of increasingly severe court rulings, the original Napster song-swapping service shut down in mid-2001. Not long afterward, the company sold its assets in bankruptcy court.
Now Fanning is returning to the digital music scene with a new company called Snocap. This time around, Fanning hopes he can help rehabilitate file-swapping technology as a way to sell music, not steal it.
Snocap is basically aiming to create tools for identifying songs as they are moved around online and prompt listeners for payment before they can listen. He foresees new file-swapping services built on the technology -- or old ones that have added it -- that will keep millions of people swapping tens of millions of songs a day, all with the blessing of the music labels.
The biggest hurdle is still Fanning's old vision of Napster. Any new service using Snocap's technology will have to compete not only with Apple Computer's iTunes and other song stores, but also with rivals such as eDonkey, Kazaa and other file-swapping services where music can still be found for free.
ZDNet UK sister site CNET News.com talked with Fanning about Snocap's vision for a detente between file-swappers and record labels.
