Legal peer-to-peer services: Gimmick or genius?
Published: 07 Dec 2004 14:45 GMT
Because of your history with Napster, can you go into the peer-to-peer community and say, "This is the way to do it now; this is the way the market is evolving?" Will they follow your lead, or does that at least give you an entree to customers?
It helps having been in the same situation at a peer-to-peer service and knowing what it's like to want to build certain things into your product but you can't. All of these are things that we've considered in the development of Snocap. Having been at Napster helps... It's really shaped what we've developed, and they know that we understand what they're dealing with.
Toward the end of Napster, it sounded like you were having problems with fingerprinting. Is this 100 percent now? Is it bullet proof?
Nothing's 100 percent, but it's extremely reliable.
Could your technology be used as a filter if it were plugged into Kazaa or some other peer-to-peer network?
We're using identification technologies. Identification technologies can be used to filter. But that's just one piece. We're incorporating it for reasons that are related to growing the amount of content available. It's really the difference between being able to use the technology for one thing rather than another, and seeing that similarity, versus what our actual business is.
It's not what we're about. We're trying to build something that facilitates a high-quality service. Respecting rights holders is important, but it's all working under the assumption that everyone is trying to make as much content available as possible. The business is built on the premise that a peer-to-peer service ought to be able to launch a successful authorised system and have the breadth of content that they had available previously, or close to that.
Is there any way to apply this to video games, software, movies or other things found on peer-to-peer networks?
Absolutely. In fact we would like to extend our business and our technology. The system itself is very easily extended into other areas. The fingerprint technology is music specific, but fingerprinting can apply to video, etc. The rule-sets are specific to music, but those are also very easily adaptable. So our system in a general sense is very extensible, and we believe that once the music space begins to adopt the Snocap system, there will be a demand for this kind of architecture to provide content in other forms.
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