Looking to Share Again

Now, at 24, his second set is taking a different direction: Legitimizing the revolution Napster started.

Fanning's new company, Snocap Inc., aims to transform the music-swapping free-for-all Napster sparked into a vast online marketplace where people can buy authorized tracks from each other.

Napster launched the online file-sharing craze and attracted tens of millions of users before the company collapsed in 2002 under a legal assault by the major record labels. Napster's successors -- even more popular online services such as Kazaa, Morpheus and Grokster -- have proved harder for the labels to drive out of business.

Five years after starting the fight, Fanning, who sports close-cropped hair under a baseball cap, believes he can end it. It's a personal mission that began shortly after he left Napster.

"I do have something to prove at some level," Fanning said this week in one of his first interviews in more than two years. "In terms of creating something lasting -- that we can go and create something that is a representation of what we believe, that is a representation of the ideals we had at Napster."

Fanning and his fellow programmers, many of them Napster alums, set out to create a database that would keep information about recordings and their owners and leverage the power of peer-to-peer networks, which link hordes of small computers.

The idea is to marry the mass reach and vast catalog of the untamed networks with the reliability, quality -- and legality -- of the sales approved by the record labels, publishers and others with rights to the music.

Sometime next year, peer-to-peer networks that want to sell songs will be able to use the database. Song files whose owners have been identified can be transmitted as long as payments go through Snocap to the various rights holders.

If a song hasn't been registered with Snocap beforehand, it can still change hands. But the act of checking it against the database will allow Snocap to take a digital fingerprint of the new file. The copyright owners can then lay claim to it.

Song owners can set the price and attach almost any conditions they want to the material, including whether and when it expires and how many times it can be copied. They can even name countries where they don't want the songs to be made available. The songs are marked with an audio fingerprinting system licensed from Philips.