The New Face of File Sharing?

Now, his beefy, half-shaven mug is the labels' newest sign of hope.

Rosso is the driving force behind Mashboxx, a company that wants to help the labels wring some cash out of the world's most popular file-sharing networks. Those networks have been hotbeds of music piracy, but Mashboxx would turn bootlegged tunes into legal downloads that users could sample, buy and share.

On the surface, the 56-year-old Rosso seems an unlikely choice to help the music industry turn its "peer-to-peer" problems into profit.

Before founding Mashboxx last year, Rosso was the wisecracking president of two companies whose file-sharing software helped fuel online piracy: Grokster and Optisoft, the creator of Blubster. He was the Clown Prince of Peer-to-Peer, a widely quoted quip-meister who pilloried the music industry daily as being dimwitted, shortsighted, slow-footed and, well, evil.

"I would lay awake at night thinking of the most incendiary things I could possibly say and hurl these Molotov cocktails out there, knowing that the media would grasp on it and it would spread," he said.

Long before he was cashing Grokster's paychecks, however, Rosso was playing for the other team. He spent more than 20 years as an entertainment industry publicist, touting the likes of the Bee Gees and New Kids on the Block.

And even when he was promoting Grokster and Blubster, Rosso was working behind the scenes to convert the major record companies from antagonists into allies. Eventually, he found a taker: Andrew Lack, the former television executive whom Sony Corp. brought in to lead its music division.

"Andy Lack looked at this problem with a fresh pair of eyes," said Thomas Hesse, president of global digital business for Sony BMG. "He looked at it without emotion. He looked for a solution

So now Rosso has come full circle, in a sense.

Mashboxx is what many label executives have pined for: a program that lets people dip into the vast pool of bootlegs online to sample songs but not make free copies of them. In particular, it uses song-recognition technology to block unauthorized downloads, a technique that the labels want all file-sharing companies to adopt.

"His leadership is significant," said Chief Executive Mitch Bainwol of the Recording Industry Assn. of America, a group that has been the target of many of Rosso's jibes. "He's made this kind of critical leap, and that is to say we in the P2P space ought to find a way to compensate the property owner."