Cantametrix Plans To Track All MP3s On The Web

Akilesh Rajan writes: "A Stereophile article reports that Cantametrix is further developing its MusicDNA system for identifying and tracking all MP3s on the Internet. MusicDNA's use of DSP (Digital Signal Processing) technology and psychoacoustic modeling allows it to analyze an MP3 and immediately tell what song it is, and so also recognize who, if anyone, owns its copyright. Company reps explain one possible application: 'A MusicDNA Analyzer can be located, for example, on the Web crawler of a large search engine, to ensure that the search engine only points to legal music.'" I could see this working a lot better if all the music on the Web was pristine and complete -- which it's not.

Comments

Year 3000

[Peter Dyck]

And I can see this quote in the future:

"...to ensure that the search engine only points to legal, government approved books."

Ha ha ha....

[pb]

Yeah, right.

I'd like to see them do this, and encompass the myriad of different protocols and formats that abound on the web today, plus the ones that will be designed just to break it.

I think that simple passwords, encryption, steganography, and file-sharing will each be enough to defeat this, but who knows, maybe we'll have to go to something really sophisticated, like trading over IRC, or ratioed ftp...

Companies that base their business model over scare tactics just crack me up...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Mass bandwidth use?

[sith]

So this means that a search engine is now going to need to download every mp3 file it finds each time it crawls the net? Boy I feel sorry for mp3.com when one day some machine @ inktomi decides to pull down *every* mp3 on the site. Thats gonna be an expensive bill...

Yeah, "original" artist

[kris]

I could see this working a lot better if all the music on the Web was pristine and complete -- which it's not.

Now, that's funny. I could see this working a lot better if all the music on the radio was new and original. How would you tell one Britney Spears song from another, or from any Ace Of Base title?


© Copyright 2000 Kristian Köhntopp

Idiotic bluster, much like the "GIFworm"

[StandardDeviant]

I remember not long after I got an internet connection (through the U, august of 94), this big brouhaha happened about some people (Unisys? Lawyers acting for them? How quickly brain cells die when soaked with hard alcohol...) that were supposedly releasing a worm onto the Internet to "ferret out" patent-infringing GIFs...

The small problem with that was, it was impossible. Even if some secret header code existed in "licensed" gifs, which to my semi-sketchy knowledge about graphics file formats does not (unless maybe gifs from "licensed" authoring tools had some sort of characteristic fingerprint like "made by gimp" or whatever), imagine for a second the difficulty of finding, cataloging, and determining the ownership of every gif on the net.

Now take all of the previous difficulties of this type of InfringeWare, undiminished and in fact probably heightened, and add to them the fact that now instead of being concerned about the file format (a relatively fixed thing), you're trying to judge infringe/not-infringe based on the content itself. This would require one of two things to work (from what I can tell talking out my ass on slashdot @ 5am whilst drinking):

• 1 -- a complete DB of every song ever recorded in any digital format, possibly at different bitrates. This would be for a "dumb" approach using pattern matching/comparison (like a global regular expression for mp3 contents, which might actually be a nifty hack for a local program ("computer, play me someting hardcore, with lots of drums" and the machine looks for patterns in the files themselves to spit something out into the soundstream)).
• 2 -- an expert system powerful enough to comprehend and categorize musical information, that could tell a licensed recording of Mozart from a bootleg NIN concert, i.e. practically full-blown Artificial Intelligence.

Both of these things seem less than likely to occur anytime soon. (If they had the former they'd be whoring it out a la terraserver's approach to space imagery, if they had the latter I hope as a human being that we could find more meaningful things to do with true AI than searching for mp3z! :-) )

No, I think that this is just hot air intended to scare people into thinking the Big Bad Patent/Copyright-Holding Wolf is Just Around The Corner, so It's Time To Shape Up And Quit Trading Mp3s You Little Monsters... Another option is this is a vaporware company trying to feed of the greed and stupidity of the record labels...

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Savior for the Internet, nightmare for the idiots?

[jorbettis]

From the I can't believe they're this stupid dept.

Could this be the Technolibertarian's dream come true and the end for constant vigilance and street corner phophetizing as we know it? FuckedFromtheOutset has announced a preliminary effort to start the planning process on some more vaporwear. Music DNA, that the company claims *cough* that it is capable of identifing and tracking of billions of existing and new MP3 files on the internet providing (get this) exact accounting for the copyright. "Thus enabling file sharing and linking value added data to songs" Fucked said in a pathetic attempt to spin. When asked if they were suggesting that it is currently illegal to share files, Fucked said "No Comment."

Fucked also announced that, in order to cover it's massive burn rate, it has duped some brainless Europeans (similar to brainless Americans, but know more than one lanugage) into throwing money at Fucked. Musican Eric Clapton has been starving in recent months due to the evils of Napster, but still managed to scrape up a few million dollars to throw into the furnace. "Mr. Clapton's investment in the company speaks of the importance importance Music DNA will have in returning to the record labels their rightful monopolies, I mean, I saw the guy, he's all skin and bones." Someone said in another interestingly unattributed quote.

The company anticipates that with industry-wide adoption of its music registry, acceptence by every node on the internet, a constutional amendment, a UN Resolution, and a few minor acts of God, the system will enable copyright holders to identify their content usage through at least a portion of the internet, thus ensuring that ownership and royalty right are fully "exploited, oops, don't print that, I meant 'monetized'". According to Fucked, Music DNA dosen't have an offical ship date but should come out "in a few months".

Music DNA is an extension of other FuckedFromTheOutset products which have already made a huge impact on the distribution of copyrighted material across the Internet, which include a bunch of neat sounding jargon and buzzwords. "I assure you, we have tons of buzzwords. MCSE's bow to our buzzword dominance".

FuckedFromTheOutset bullshits about how the process works: "Ok, see, it's sorta like this, Songs have patterns, right? and these don't change much if you have an exact digital copy, like a compressed 40kpbs mp3 recorded throught an analog bridge, see? So bitrate dosen't matter because this is about the information carred in it, all codec's have the same information, they don't try to elimanate information and guess at what's in the gaps." our weakly attributed source continued making a fool of himself for a few minutes, then said "Search engines can increase by atleast tenfold the amount of time and bandwith their spiders crawl through to make sure they're not linking to copyrighted materal, they're really gung ho about that, plus, an analyzer can be incorperated into a peice of client software residing on the PC to er, make sure the music is complete? Appearently, one can't figure that out by listening to it. We've talked with the XMMS people, they're all over that."

Mor E. Assplease, an investor in the company fumbles: "Obviously, copyright protection rackets maintainence is a seminal issue confronting the Cyber-eNew iEconomy.com at the moment, and music is at the heard of the matter. With Music DNA, Napster and Scour could cover their asses by putting a lame block that dosen't work to appease the courts. We can now account to the artists and songwriters who have been shortchanged by the labels for long before the eInternet iEconomy.com, or wait, I didn't mean that". The company's Olsen Wells expresses his hopes for the process, adding that "as the industry transitions from music as a product to music as a service, Music DNA could conceivably have the greatest single impact on the music buisness since the creation of the MP3 format". When asked if he could clarify that statment, remove a few buzzwords, or somehow make it make sense, Wells replied "No Comment".

Richard Stallman, leader of the Free Software Foundation, and proponent of free music, corrected our use of the word 'Linux' (appearently, it's GNU/Linux) but then began to laugh hysterically as we attempted to explain what Music DNA was. "I can just mess it up with dd on my Linux box" He continued, "GNU! GNU/Linux box I mean! please don't print that".

Lawrence Lessing, a Technolibertian known for his book Code and other Laws of Cyberspace, when asked about it, faught to keep an amused look off of his face and said "Well, we've obviously overestimated the enemy here, I'll have to drastically restructure my 'invisable hand' theory, it assumes a much higher caliber opponent than that with which we are dealing".

Political Pressure

[interiot]

How 'bout just using political pressure? "Ladies and Gentlemen, this company could easily ensure that it doesn't trade in illegal wares. We have refined the program to a point where anyone can use it, in fact, Joe Schmoe here, a kindergarden teacher, was able to install it in his school's library in two hours. If search engine X isn't willing to take such easy steps, then the statement they're intending to send is that they wish to support trafficing in illegal wares."

An argument similar to this was used to get the mandatory-porn-filters-in-schools-n-libraries amendment included in the House Appropriations bill that has a good possibility of being passed in the next week or two:

• Mr. McCain: Internet filtering system work[s], and they need not be blunt instruments that unduly constrain the availability of legitimately instructional material. Today they are adaptable, capable of being fine-tuned to accommodate changes in websites as well as the evolving needs of individual schools and even individual lesson-plans. ...

  As we have seen through an increasing flurry of shocking media reports, the Internet has become the tool of choice for pedophiles who utilize the Internet to lure and seduce children into illegal and abusive sexual activity. ...As we wire America's children to the Internet, we are inviting these lowlifes to prey upon our children in every classroom and library in America.

From porn filtering to copyright filtering. Not a large leap.
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Installed at search engines?

[EasyTarget]

mp3, pron, are by far the two biggest search catagories out there, if the shlock-horror headlines in most rags is true.

"Dear Mrs search engine owner, please may we install something on your search engine servers to cut out a sizeable proportion of your customer base?"

What a great business model? it will -require- a law change to work, unless they think UCITA/DMCA can already be used to imtimidate big players like altaVista.

EZ
-'Press Ctrl + Alt + Delete to log on..'