"Legitimate" P2P: Feeding the Sharks by George Ziemann -- June 18, 2005 The Washington Post is running a Reuters story which was lifted from Billboard, so I'm assuming this is something Billboard wants to talk about: Shawn Fanning's new enterprise, SnoCap. Here's a portion of the story. Snocap is intended to help guide users of P2P networks to legitimate content registered with the filtering service. It also blocks users from distributing or accessing unlicensed or unrecognized files. Snocap also aims to build content catalogs by capturing digital "fingerprints" of live, rare and unreleased works that users are attempting to share. The information will be reported to content owners with the goal of helping labels prioritize which music should be cleared for sale. In the meantime, the company has quietly inked digital-fingerprinting deals with more than a dozen indie labels and distributors, including TVT, Ryko Group, Digital Musicworks International, Artemis Records, Nettwerk Records and the Independent Online Distribution Alliance. That is on top of major-label deals with Universal, Sony BMG and EMI. Negotiations with Warner are ongoing. Snocap wants to expand the universe of content it represents by opening its digital registry to all labels and artists. For your average Joe on the street, this seems like a good thing on the surface. A p2p network that filters out the so-called illegitimate files. There will be some kind of DRM involved, plus a payment scheme. Kind of like iTunes. If this sounds good to you, go ahead and stop reading. I can't help but to be skeptical of anything that 3 out of 4 of the major labels agree on. At least we know that this has been blessed by the cartel, so it will be allowed to survive, the first obstacle to any technology that touches music. According to their website, "SNOCAP provides copyright owners with these benefits: Through SNOCAP, labels and individual artists can finally embrace peer-to-peer networks as a safe and secure distribution channel. One-stop access to clear rights and manage online distribution across retail destinations. The ability to maintain full control of content by determining business rules and setting pricing and usage terms. Reduced costs by providing accounting services associated with receiving wholesale payments from SNOCAP powered retailers. Increased revenues by allowing record labels and artists to sell their entire catalogs, including new releases, live remixed and out of print tracks. Gives independent artists the ability to take full advantage of the global distribution channel." Take that all in for a moment. Now let's go back to the story: Snocap "blocks users from distributing or accessing unlicensed or unrecognized files". By allowing record labels to "maintain full control of content," they take away the ability of others to contribute anything without prior approval. This means that any network that uses this filtering system has been rendered useless for the wider purposes of peer-to-peer, such as education, science, medicine and research. And I have to wonder about the aim "to build content catalogs by capturing digital 'fingerprints' of live, rare and unreleased works that users are attempting to share. The information will be reported to content owners with the goal of helping labels prioritize which music should be cleared for sale." Or initiate a lawsuit. We don't want those "content owners" to be disgruntled. They're doing everything they can to make sure the artists get paid what is due to them. Or at least that the "content owners" get paid what is due the artists. Which brings us to this week's example of an act that got screwed over by their label: The Bay City Rollers. Since they split in the late-1970s, the one-time superstars who were the Bay City Rollers have been riven by bitter squabbles over a fortune in unpaid royalties - though that should be the least of their worries. One is battling drugs and depression; another was caught downloading child porn; a third has suffered a stress-induced stroke. Today, [Les] McKeown (the band's second lead singer) has still not seen his Rollers royalties. In 1978, it was estimated that he was owed £1.8m. The most recent estimates suggest that the band as a whole are owed up to £50m. Often, McKeown walks into record shops and comes across new compilations featuring Rollers hits - between 1996 and 1998 Bay City Rollers hits were released on 118 albums worldwide. So what happened to the money? Most of the money appears to be held in trust for the band by the record company Sony-BMG, which bought out Arista in 1976. Sony-BMG has told the Guardian that it has been unable to pay royalties because there is no copy of the initial contract and the band have been feuding so long that they are unable to agree who is owed what. So instead of giving each of them a paltry million or so to tide them over, Sony decided to wait 29 years and see how many of them died first. But hey, they have "full control of content" and that's what matters.