Affiliate Marketing Secrets

Fanning incorporated Snocap two weeks after the Supreme Court forced Napster into bankruptcy in September 2002 for facilitating copyright infringement. (Roxio bought the Napster name, and Fanning is no longer affiliated with it.) The June Supreme Court decision holding companies liable for illegal file sharing by their users suddenly gave the recording industry more negotiating leverage with illegal file-sharing services. And with more listeners eager to find legal ways to download music, Snocap offers a viable alternative. Snocap’s challenge is to help music providers offer file swapping without the viruses prevalent on illegal sites, so customers would pay. Compared with online music stores, peer-to-peer services still attract the most users–by some accounts, 60 million people in the U.S. “That’s about the number who voted for George Bush!” said Sam Yagan, president of MetaMachine Inc., the company behind eDonkey, a free peer-to-peer site.