SNOCAP: Commercial Peer-to-Peer

Shawn Fanning, the creator of the original Napster, has now founded a company called SNOCAP. The company, based in San Francisco, has just struck a deal with Universal Music Group, the world’s biggest record label and, interestingly enough, one of the plaintiffs that sued Napster Inc. which led the company to bankruptcy in 2002. Universal has agreed to register its entire catalog with Snocap. Additonally, SNOCAP has cut deals with numerous indie labels and a company called Independent Online Distribution Alliance, which is an aggregator of independent label content for digital distribution. They bring to the table an agreement which includes 75,000 tracks from 500 independent labels to SNOCAP. In March, Sony BMG signs on and will offer their catalog as well. It’s unclear from their website how users will pay for the content provided, but it is interesting to see the P2P model applied for legal downloads. The company plans to launch sometime this year.

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In case you missed it, this was a pretty good April Fools joke. Or check out the Top 100 April Fool’s Day Hoaxes of all Time.

I was just catching up on my news feeds when I read a story over at Cnet that said Google announced Friday that it planned to double the storage for its free email accounts. Sure enough, I checked out my Gmail account which now stated "You are currently using 34 MB (2%) of your 2050 MB." Holy crap! What’s even more shocking is that the story also said that "Google will add a yet-to-be-determined amount of extra storage daily, with no
plans to stop." Even more? Google is really raising the bar here! I think the clamor for invites will begin again once people here this!