Sony BMG, Grokster Join Forces

Dubbed "Mashboxx," the venture marks a surprising alliance between a major record label and an online network that the entertainment industry has blamed for rampant piracy.

The initiative reflects the growing interest among record labels and movie studios to harness -- rather than fight -- the popularity of file sharing.

The effort drew a skeptical response from some file-sharing advocates, however, who said Sony BMG wasn't really embracing the "peer to peer" technology that millions of people use every day to copy music for free.

Although many of the details are still in flux, people familiar with Mashboxx said that it would probably work like this: When users search for a Sony BMG track, the system will allow them to download only authorized versions of the song.

In some cases, these could be free promotional tracks that come with an offer to buy higher-quality renditions of the music. Mashboxx hasn't set any prices. Many online music stores sell songs for 99 cents each.

The idea behind the venture is to let people continue to use file sharing to discover music at no charge, while encouraging them to pay for the songs they want to keep.

Some of the technology for Mashboxx probably will come from Snocap Inc., a start-up launched by Shawn Fanning -- the college dropout who created the pioneering Napster file-sharing network. Mashboxx is being run by Wayne Rosso, a file-sharing firebrand given to rhetorical flourishes about ignorance and evil in the entertainment industry.

Rosso and executives at Sony BMG, Grokster Ltd. and Snocap all declined to comment. Sony BMG was created last summer by the merger of the music divisions of Sony Corp. and Bertelsmann.

Music industry insiders noted that Mashboxx was one of several new efforts to convert file sharing into legal downloading.

"There's a lot of serious effort on the label side of the table to try to make this work, more than you would have ever expected to see," said one record company executive who asked not to be named. "There's some heavy lifting, but everybody's really talking through the possibilities."