Snocap
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| Private | |
| Industry | Online Music |
| Fate | Acquired |
| Founded | 2002 |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, California, United States |
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Key people
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Shawn Fanning Jordan Mendelson Ron Conway Ali Aydar |
| Website | www.snocap.com |
SNOCAP was founded by Shawn Fanning (best known for creating the Napster music service), Jordan Mendelson, and Ron Conway. Other SNOCAP employees included music lawyer Christian Castle, the company's first General Counsel, and Ali Aydar, the company's Chief Operating Officer, who joined imeem after its acquisition of SNOCAP in April 2008.
SNOCAP was formed in 2002, during the final days of Napster's bankruptcy proceedings, but didn't launch publicly until December 2004. A significant number of its employees were people who had worked with Fanning at the original Napster; an August 2005 SNOCAP profile in Time magazine noted that "27% of SNOCAP's employees are Napster veterans."
SNOCAP's initial focus was on developing technology content owners (in particular artists and labels) could use to register their content; rights holders who registered their content could also set business rules controlling where and how that content is available on the web.
SNOCAP opened its digital registry in June 2005, enabling artists and labels to register their content in SNOCAP's system. Universal Music Group was the first major label to sign on to register its content in SNOCAP's digital registry. The company eventually secured deals with all four major labels to register their content in SNOCAP's database (including Universal Music Group, EMI, Warner Music Group, and SonyBMG Music Entertainment).
New York Times reporter Saul Hansell explained SNOCAP's technology in a November 2005 article:
"The heart of Snocap is its sophisticated registry, which will index electronically all the files on the file-sharing networks. "Rights holders," which are what he calls musicians and their labels, will use the system to find those songs on which they hold copyrights and claim them electronically. Then they will enter into the registry the terms on which those files can be traded. It could be just like iTunes - pay 99 cents, and you own it - or it could be trickier: listen to it five times free, then buy it if you like it. Or it could be beneficent: listen to it free forever and (hopefully) buy tickets to the artist's next concert. Of course, the rights holders could also play tough: this is not for sale or for trading, and you can't have it."
SNOCAP's ultimate goal was to license this technology to file-sharing services, enabling a new wave of "legal P2P" services that used SNOCAP's technology to track and filter music sharing within a network, blocking registered content that labels & artists didn't want shared but allowing sharing of anything else. While two file-sharing services, Mashboxx and Grokster, signed up to use SNOCAP's technology, their SNOCAP-powered services never launched.
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Wikipedia