Emusic Tracking MP3s On Napster

Nice Geek sent us a wired story talking about EMusic tracking MP3s on Napster. Several issues: mainly the flaws of using MD5 checksums to determine the source of the MP3, but also the problem that using a bot violates Napster's terms of service. I don't really have any problems with this, but it'll be interesting to see what the next step will be.

Comments

Emusic also sponsors open source Linux projects...

[big.ears]

Emusic is one of the sponsors of the Freeamp open source music player (which has limited support for .ogg formats, and is available for Linux and Windows). They have teamed with a company called Relatable, and another project called MusicBrainz, to categorize and catalog mp3s and cds. Relatable has a signaturing system that I believe uses acoustic fingerprinting--which is robust to small errors (or maybe even large errors) in songs. MusicBrainz takes these fingerprints and uses them to determine what songs you actually have, and then can use collaboritive filtering techniques to suggest playlists to you. I think this combination and seamless integration is making freeamp a very attractive player, although it still needs a little work and a little more help from interested developers.

What does all of this have to do with napster and you? Well, freeamp allows you to download/stream music from emusic fairly easily (for a fee--something like $10 a month). So, if the napster distribution channel dries up, they become a quite attractive alternative. No more crappy searches, no more little red dots beside the songs, linux integration, artist-tipping support. Now, I'm not saying that emusic's actions here are good or bad, but do have a legal approach to digital music, while napster/gnutella/etc are questionable at the very least. They do support an open source project as well.

Re:Finally!

[GeekDork]

Your modem/DSL/ISDN adapter is a tool for theft. Throw it out of your window immediately or I will sue your nuts off, bubba... ;-)

This discussion is old and boring. Napster itself is a tool for exchanging music. It is, however, used to exchange "illegal" music(???).

EMusic is using a bot on thre service and therefore should be banned from the network as anyone caught running one. I don't want to hear someone cry "it's a good bot!" or stuff like that. EMusic violates Napster' s TOS and even makes it public. There's no excuse for plain stupidity.

Aaaah! My blood pressure's coming down again...