Shawn Fanning's New Venture 165
prostoalex writes "We've read about Justin Frankel, but what are the other heroes of the MP3 revolution up to? News.com.com.com tells the story of Shawn Fanning's new company. SnoCap (which changed its name from Open Copyright Database) is currently developing file-sharing mechanisms that would allow the music industry to earn money."
How good is this for the consumer? (Score:5, Interesting)
dead page (Score:2, Interesting)
Napster and Shawn Fanning (Score:3, Interesting)
Napster was a lowest common denominator PTP system. It stole MP3's. Many people thought of simple systems like this that the masses could use but most knew better than to damage PTP credibility before this. Writing a Napster program in VB would take a few days at best. Not that his idea wasn't what counts, it is and simple is usually better. But in his case there was no way around it. Napster was made to steal music. At least with Hotline and similar technologies you could say it had other purposes and in some cases make other purposes for it.
Napster has caused so many problems with legit PTP systems. My problem with it was it was so flagrant. It was a dumb mans PTP system and it brought attention to other areas that otherwise didn't want it.
Now, I probably sound like I am hating on Napster because now it's harder for me to steal things. Well, it's not harder for to steal things so you can rule that out. But, I know systems are being monitored closely now and the general public knows what a PTP system is, well sort of. I download some music I don't own. I use free software so I don't need to pirate that. But now I can get a huge fine if I D/L a song from the wrong person. I blame Napster for this. Not for me D/Ling things, but for being so stupid, flagrant and blatantly illegal about it they fucked it up for everyone.
Re:How good is this for the consumer? (Score:4, Interesting)
Having a bittorrent-type distribution system with the online music store always on might work, but there would probably be too many problems wrt DRM.
But what do I know? I've never run an unprofitable company with no business model before, Shawn has.
OGG vs SnoCap (Score:5, Interesting)
This kid just has an idea for a peer-to-peer system and he already has a large angel investor... the same angel investor that poured large amounts of money into napster. And the system doesn't even exist yet.
On the otherhand, take OGG -- a kickass music format that we all love and cherish. A few advertising wizards could turn it into the standard music format on the internet. Where are the VCs and angel investors for OGG?
OGG is a proven product that rocks. SnoCap is little more than white text on a blue background.
SnoCap will make money because non-tech people remember that napster exploded with potential. SnoCap will make money because investors see that I-Tunes is working.
OGG will struggle because the non-tech investing community doesn't understand the power of a new and better music format.
The world is twisted.
AC
Love Your Enemy (Score:5, Interesting)
If I were this group of record companies... I would kill myself and do the world a favor.
Wait...
If I were this group of record companies, I would hire a kid like this in a heartbeat. He is likely to understand the peer-to-peer community much more than the record executives. He's help people do it the free and easy way... and maybe he can transition everybody into a more "legit" method of music transfer.
I don't think the record execs are scared of this guy... I think they are having wet dreams about his re-securing their monolopy on music.
What is this kid likely to do? We'll just have to wait and see. He's probably smart enough that he could sweet talk his way into a lot of vaporware dollars...
AC
Re:Please don't compare the two. (Score:2, Interesting)
On the other hand, Frankel's work is consistently excellent. He writes creative applications that are small, elegant, and fast. The two people really are in different leagues.
Re:Napster and Shawn Fanning (Score:1, Interesting)
It makes me feel... (Score:3, Interesting)
There are many cold, calculating and ruthless people in the music business. Shawn Fanning is one of them. Please don't ever think for one single second that he was "one of us".
Re:Common MIsconceptions..... (Score:4, Interesting)
So lets review, Sean was smart enough to let his Uncle own over 70% of the company before they had even hired one employee, smart enough to never construct a model that would generate one cent of revenue, and smart enough to let his VCs and lawyers run Napster into the ground and he's working with them again? Wow, what a plan, anyone wondering whats going to happen again?
Just to be clear, how much did you, or anyone else net from Napster? Aside from all the lawyers of course? Nothing? This is sad. Sean is a clever opportunistic programmer, but he's not a sharp businessman. He's in league with the same people that ran Napster into the ground. He's a dupe. He's being taken advantage of, at best, and he's shortsighted at worst. I for one hope he cuts the bounds, turns his back on these idiots that ruined Napster and truly does his own thing.
Don't be so quick to hand him all the credit for the implosion of Napster though. Afterall, he was surrounded by geniuses. Brilliant people that blew the chance of a lifetime and netted nothing, and convinced him it was a great idea. No doubt how they have strung him along with this one.
A sad story. Pity the man.
Re:Winamp 5 is a hog (Score:3, Interesting)
Have you actually tried winamp 5 or are you talking out of your ass?
Seriously, winamp 5 is winamp 2 with winamp3 skin support (which is where most of the hogging comes from, and you can even disable it by uninstalling the "modern skins support" plugin) plus ripping and burning support (depending on who you ask -- it was added in an unofficial 2.x version)
On my athlon 2100+ system, winamp5 takes up 2.5 megs of ram while playing with a classic skin and less than 1% cpu (task manager says 0%) and while it jumps up to 15 megs with the default modern skin, cpu use stays the same.
On the new functionality thing, modern skins are a huge plus, as they have better international/ unicode support, they can alpha blend (try always on top + transparency with auto opaque on focus/hover). Also, classic skins feel very very small on 1280x1024 and up. The music library is better too, and the global hotkeys are kind of useful. I personally don't care about ripping and burning but i guess someone could like them.