11/6/03 1:25 - 2:20 / JKP 212 / Alex Rofman / Director of Business Development;
Snocap (new venture of Shawn Fanning of Napster fame)

That’s one of the only entries you’ll pull up if you do a Google under Fanning and Snocap - Fanning being Shawn, the creator the Napster, and Snocap being his latest venture.

There’s a site with a logo, but not much more.

In the meanwhile, the idea that Fanning has a project on the boil that’s somehow linked to p2p and record companies and audio fingerprinting has been floating around the Net since last summer, if not before. But there hasn’t been much in the way of hard news on the subject.

However, if CNET’s Stefanie Olsen and John Borland have it right, that could change soon.

“Snocap’s plan, which involves identifying music files being traded through file-swapping networks and then attaching a price tag to them, is resonating well with music industry executives,” they write here.

” ‘It’s a pretty well thought-out idea, but the success of it hinges on everybody in the ecosystem getting involved,’ said one record label executive familiar with Snocap. ‘The key to its success is the peer-to-peer companies agreeing to participate. If they do participate, it could be phenomenal’.”

Requests for comment from Fanning and other Snocap employees were not returned. However, “Fanning’s return to the peer-to-peer world is one of the most ambitious of several ongoing attempts to bring about a detente between file-swapping networks and record labels, which have been at war almost since the day Napster launched in 1999.”

A filing with the California Secretary of State says Snocap was incorporated in Delaware in 2002 with Conway as president, listed as the sole officer, say Olsen and Borland. “The filing also notes that the company changed its name to Snocap from Open Copyright Database on June 25, 2003. The company, at least in its early stages, looks much like Fanning’s old one.”

Snocap has been working on ways to identify songs, as they are traded through a file-swapping network, including using audio fingerprinting to monitor the sonic characteristics of music files, says their story, going on:

“Once an identification is made, the download could be blocked, unless the computer user pays a fee, as if they were downloading a song from iTunes or another digital song store. Alternately, some mechanism could be established, under which the file-swapping network operator would pay for the downloads that are tracked by Snocap’s system and would later be reimbursed by subscription fees or advertising revenue.”

Record label executives are interested but not sold, “sources said,” and, “Executives from several major file-swapping companies said Fanning has yet to contact them; some said other companies with similar ideas based on audio fingerprinting were looking for support.”

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