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Napster Licenses "Acoustic Fingerprinting"
n8willis writes: "Well, it was probably only a matter of time, but Reuters reports that Napster has licensed an "acoustic fingerprinting" technology from someone called Relatable to insert into its filtering system. Boy, I just can't wait for the opportunity to pay Napster a monthly fee to share my music with other people. And have them censor me for my trouble, too."
The processed MP3 could sound like white noise to the fingerprinting software, and be rejected by the filter as an MP3 of some retarded techno band.
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Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Yeah, it's getting so stealing other people's copyrighted material is hardly worth it anymore. Why, just the other day, I almost had to *buy* a CD, like back in the dark ages.
Oh wait, I forget. The record companies have it coming because they charge too much and put out crap and rip off the artists and drag their feet in new technology and pay off politicians for favorable legislation. I also forgot that all Slashdotters only use Napster in a way consistant with fair use to get digital copies of music they already own. Silly me.
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Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
How hard will it be for an indie or a producer of free digital music to include their works in the database- and more importantly, is there going to be support for an opt _in_ list on things like Napster: like "This fingerprint HAS permission to be involved in noncommercial copying, to any extent"? I'm wondering if the whole technology will be hijacked so you in practice cannot both have your fingerprints on file, and cooperate with services like Napster. Your submitting prints of your stuff will automatically cause them to be thrown off all forms of fair-use file sharing, but you don't get paid anything out of the taxes collected and given to the RIAA. Sort of worst of both worlds.
Sell his music on the internet and he can be eDitty - hey, that's got a ring to it.
PATENT TIME!!!
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
What's wrong with being able to share something for which I have paid???
That is an overly simplistic argument. If you didn't get the rights to share the hard work someone else made, then you are likely in the wrong.
It isn't about "sharing" I think it's about a bunch of people benefiting from other's work without proper compensation. It seems that it is the people that haven't tried to live life on both sides of the supply and demand equation that can't understand. If you wrote a program to make money would you appreciate people copying it, enjoying your work without compensating you?
Oh, I get it. Y'all recording companies came up with some "agreement" that we have to live by when we buy your stuff for no reason other than to make y'allselves billionaires.
Um, no. The idea of copyright existed long before anyone could record and reproduce an audio waveform. The industries may have tried to pervert it but it is still there and in general we've always had certain rights and they've always had certain rights, the only thing that changed was technology to allow people much more easily swap tunes that they had no right to swap. If you swap legit CDs that is your right, but swapping MP3s is not.
get with it already... they're going after not a single person for downloading anything that they own. They're only going after people who makes stuff available to others which they have no right to distribute...
Small difference to you, big difference so far as the laws concerened. Download all you want, just don't allow any of your files to be uploaded... Of course that undermines napster completely, but that's where the problem lies in the eyes of the law.
It makes me feel old to think that I've been doing the whole MP3 thing for several years now, back before the Linux kernel had hit 2.0 and the NASDAQ was healthy when it was below 2000. The rather recent popularity of MP3 trading, facilitated by faster internet connections and programs like Napster, is just amusing to me because I remember getting shit off newsgroups or maybe a handful of IRC chanels that even had a conception that you could compress music to a transferable size. Did anyone here use Oth.net? Ahhh, anonymous FTPs for file trading. WarFTP and Serv-U never had it so good. Anyways the point of this rambling is to remember that Napster only facilitated MP3 trading's popularity, they didn't really come up with anything profound. Until the RIAA makes it so you can only listen to music through a microtranceiver in your molars people are going to copy and compress music and look for music they don't have on CDs.
Stop whining about the RIAA anyways, they will never "get it" because they are business men. See they work with late nineteenth century industrial ideas in their heads because thats what they learned in business school and it is how mass manufacturing works. The RIAA will vehemently claim they are losing money due to MP3 trading because they have a monopoly on music distribution, therefore if you're listening to music they didn't sell you they have lost money (technically). It's a nice scheme they have worked out. You sign your work over to them and they are contracted to you to provide such and such services for you. That is why people want fucking record contracts. How come you can't just go solo? THE ENTIRE BROADCASTING INDUSTRY IS BUILT AROUND THE WAY THE RIAA DOES BUSINESS. The FCC makes it difficult for someone to get any FM bandwidth in a given area, you need serious funds to get into the business. This is where ABC, NBC, and CBS come into the picture. They make cash off the advertising their little darlings run inbetween the hit songs all the kids tune in to hear. Ever wonder why there aren't more free form radio stations? They have to play what advertisers will pay to have their commercials run with. It's the same reasons radio stations can offer you a thousand dollars for listening at a certain time. Advertising is sold at a prime rate and a thousand dollars is a small portion of that.
Napster bowing down to the RIAA isn't so much bowing down as it is to losing the ability to fight. They can only afford legal services for so long before they are run into the ground. The RIAA lawsuit knows this and thats why they went to court with such blatantly retarded premises. Their goal was to take Napster down before its shell had hardened. I doubt they expected them to put up so much of a fight. It doesn't really matter to them though. A sullied reputation doesn't amount to much when you own 90% of all recorded music. Acoustic fingerprints of songs will probably start to keep alot of people from trading more popular stuff. Thats life, tough. Find a different way to trade your copyright infringed material. Yeah it is less than legal. Putting music up for trade seriously skirts the bounds of the home recording act as you're giving it away for no monetary compensation. Napster is getting into trouble because they have made money facilitating the trade of material with questionable legality. Do I care if Napster doesn't let me trade a fingerprinted song? Not really. I'll go back to getting songs by old fashioned methods. Or I'll go down to a library and rip their public access CD collection. I don't give a fuck about anything except having alot of music that I like readily available to me.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
What you have to realize is that the RIAA is a bunch of old, fat, rich bastards who want every dime they can squeeze from you and don't give a damn about fair use rights.
When you purchase a CD, I think you still own the CD. The media. You don't own the music on there, but you own the disc itself. You have a LICENSE to listen to the music on your CD, but not to let anyone else listen to it. You can't play it in public or anything, in other words.
Under fair use, you are allowed to rip that CD for your own personal use. However you are not allowed to transfer that rip or those rights to anyone else. Furthermore, you aren't allowed to download someone else's rip because you don't have their license to use the music, you only have your own. It sounds stupid, and indeed it is, but that's the way it is.
You realize, of course, that the RIAA is not interested in keeping Napster legal. They are interested in Driving Napster out of existance so that *they* have absolute control.
MusicNet , a joint venture of RealNetworks, AOL Time Warner Inc., Bertelsmann AG, and EMI Group plc, will offer high quality music content to music lovers via downloads and streams.
cpeterso
What is this "Naptser" thing you talk about?
God, slashdot editors. I swear.
BilldaCat
1. Napster will have to invalidate old versions of the software, forcing everyone to DL a new (and probably quite larger) version with the fingerprinting tech.
2. The tech will not live up to expectations, but it will then be set to be hyper-sensitive, pleasing the record industry but making false positives and thereby shutting out content that it shouldn't.
3. Just like people garbled and ciphered artist names to get around the filename block, people will encode and garble the audio data to get around fingerprinting. Possible ways around fingerprinting:
- Invert every byte of the audio data
- Add a repeated sequence of values to the audio byte data (like a One Time Pad, perhaps)
- Split song files into smaller chunks to send over Napster which can then be lumped together into one complete file -- a lot like the way files are and have been transmitted over Usenet already for years.
- Combinations of the above, etc.
But have little fear, since this announcement is almost assuredly just a stall tactic. Given Patel's blurry and skin-deep perception of technology, Napster's lawyers figure they can convince her that the tech will take some time to be ready for prime time, and then be implemented into Napster client software and rolled out. They say it will take some months to make that happen. However, they are also looking forward to a rehearing much sooner than that, which will at any rate very likely involve putting a stay on Patel's court orders until they decide whether to even have the rehearing or not.
FWIW, I followed the Microsoft antitrust case, and I can't say I was that impressed with David Boies. He got lucky. From what I could tell, he basically flubbed everything, not bothering to drive home the points that would have made the case more clear cut, for fear that he would lose the judge in even an ounce of technical explanation. He's too much of a gambler to win a more hairy case like this one. This banking-on-a-rehearing that they are doing seems very risky to me.
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Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
How about making the client software generate the fingerprints as it generates the file library? Then, when a transfer is requested, the client software is required to send the fingerprint of the requested song to the server, which checks it against a database.
Of course, client side could mean easily fucked with, but is that such a bad thing?
"That's Tron. He fights for the Users."
Probably will be seen as a small price to pay to get the labels off their backs.
"That's Tron. He fights for the Users."
Would it make _sense_ for them to let people download songs for free to sample them? Sure.
Does that mean you have the right to do it if they decide they don't want you to?
Rights are decided socially. The technical implications of the internet have not been integrated into copyright law. While you ponder a response, check out some music. Consume it, if you can. Don't think for a second that I don't feel creators should be compensated for their works, but I can't pay my rent with Napster (without breaking good laws).
Here's some light reading (in the meantime) of some laws that might hold an equitable solution.
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+&x
Wow, I didn't realize people were still using the official Napster service. I thought they had all long gone to OpenNap, like I have, to get around all that annoying filtering stuff. (Actually, like I was doing before Northpoint when belly-up and I found myself without net access at home)
The official Napster service itself is becoming more and more irrelevant, little more than a symbol of where people are taking the music industry as it tries to fight back unsuccessfully.
I had to go to opennap to find the songs I wanted to DL so I could decide I liked them enough to buy the CD's... next thing you know they're going to have guards at music stores and require you to give proof you didn't download any mp3's off an album before they let you buy it. After all, they do seem to be doing everything they can to discourage people to enjoy music more.
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"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
that Napster sucks? I remember when pirating copyrighted material was done in secrecy... I can't believe everyone expects to be able to do it in the open. Dumbasses.
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"What do you want me to do? Whack a guy? Off a guy? Whack off a guy? Cause I'm married."
actually, several million people have talked about that.
/., for keeping the flame burning just one more day.
just like the several million people who thought it would boost live performance attendance.
or the several million people who only download mp3s at the office of cds they have at home
or the several million people who said it brings more exposure
or the millions and millions of people who, despite knowing the horse is dead, continue to flog it beyond recognition.
if i ever get 3 wishes, one of them will be the ability to get into all of the news editors' brains around the globe and erase the part that says NAPSTER = NEWS. thank you,
It's called freenet and you would be very welcome in becoming a node on the Freenet.
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My mom's going to kick you in the face!
freetantrum.org
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My mom's going to kick you in the face!
Next...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
It's wrong to get something for free if you could have payed for it?
Are you one of these people who think that people exist in order to buy stuff and make corporations profitable?
Believe it or not, there are more important things in life than being a good little consumer and doing as you're told.
"That old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed."
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Who's going to decrypt the filename? Napster would have to do it since their servers are the ones that perform the searches.
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Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
Yup... napster is on deaths door now. Its Alienating its userbase.
:)
Now people will switch to the next big thing. Life will march. We will start to have to see stories about the RIAA fighting Flapster, the new music sharing service that claims to not be making the mistakes napeter made...and the whole damned comedy will begin all over again.
What fun, what joy. Whatever.
Hows about people just start setting up freenet nodes and be done with it. At least freenet has a real purpose - making censorship of any type, for any reason, impossible. Whats even better, its decentralised and it will lead to lower network loads between networks as the number of distributed servers grows.
Win situation for everyone. Well... ok not everyone, but everyone who wants such a system to exist
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
If their fingerprinting is at all sophisticated, it has got to be awfully easy to distinguish a real recording from just random gibberish (what a compressed or encrypted file would turn out to be), which it could then just reject as not being legitimate recorded sound. Detecting backwards would be more difficult (especially since some legitimate recordings contain sections which are backwards).
Another option is to keep it 'opt-in' so it would reject anything except what it recognizes.
[I hate DJ's] IIRC, you have no legal right to make a derivative work from works [you don't own/that aren't licesnced to you ]. Thus your "work" would be infringing ...
Free Techno/Jazz/DNB/MI Music by guys obsessed with monkeys!
I think thought, that when Dr Dre samples a song, he has to pay royalties on it ... so its "legal". (not that its an excuse for being so musically bankrupt:)
Free Techno/Jazz/DNB/MI Music by guys obsessed with monkeys!
Does it recognize mp3's that are backwards? How about zipped? There are dozens of ways around this. Ok so now people won't have to scramble file names, they'll scramble the file itself. Better yet let's encrypt a whole file sharing site. Maybe we can rope the RIAA into violating the DMCA either by breaking our encryption, or violating our terms of use:
TOS: Article 5: You may not use this service in anyway if you are a member, or in the employ of the RIAA. You may not speak of the specifics of this site in any manner outside this site...
Well you get the point.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
When you use the terms "pirated" or "piracy" or any variation thereof, you are perpetuating a false image created by the record companies. They want music sharing to be given a negative connotation, and they do this by evoking images of evil computer users with forked beards, eye patches, peg legs, and the occasional parrot. I personally have no peg leg, keep my beard short, and only wear an eye patch on special occasions. (I have not yet saved up enough for the parrot.) As you can see, this use of the term "pirated" is really inappropriate. Please resist the temptation to let the music industry control your thoughts. Thank you.
Sincerely,
Redbeard
Wow, I didn't realize people were still using the official Napster service. I thought they had all long gone to OpenNap, like I have, to get around all that annoying filtering stuff.
Not if the most popular OpenNap network gives busy signals ("The server is full!") constantly.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Of course, client side could mean easily fucked with
OpenNap has a list of clients. I see eleven unofficial nap clients for Win32, not counting the numerous clients for Perl, Tcl/Tk, and Java platforms. If Napster Inc. breaks these clients, older versions of official Napster MusicShare for Win32 will also likely break.
Will I retire or break 10K?
A tool that adds 0.5 seconds of silence will totally screw Relatable's algorithm
Such an algorithm is easy to modify or replace if the beta testers can get around it so easily (Hack SDMI anyone?). The most advanced algorithms attempt to discover the actual notes, which allows for enforcement not only of phonorecord rights in sound recordings but also of derivative work and performance rights in the underlying musical composition. BMI and ASSCRAP will like this aspect, as it lets them track unauthorized covers.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Napster's dead. If you pay their 'subscription fee' you're essentially paying 'protection money.'
You're paying Napster so that that wacko-fucked british IFPI -- or whatever it's called the phonographic protection corporation or whatever -- won't come calling on your ISP and come spamming your mailbox with letters threatening you breaking global laws.
And the protection money you're paying probably won't protect you. Napster will still cancel your account, you'll still get your internet access yanked, and the IFPI will have their way and besmirch your livelihood with accusations, allegations, and criminal charges.
Then it'll be hell to *cancel* your account with Napster. They'll probably include some fucked-up clause that states if you have copyrighted material, traffic in said material, and get caught -- you'll be fined $10,000 -- and -- guess what? -- we've got your credit card!
Hell, IFPI will start demanding credit card numbers from Napster so that they -- the fucking IFPI or whatever it's called -- can save you time and effort by circumventing the legal process (a process which, the IFPI will remind you, doesn't span global borders) and simply charging you whatever they think your infringements are worth.
They'll still cancel your internet account and, if they're having a particularly bad day, might just send federal agents to your door so that when you get out of the shower a couple of junior g-men will be standing there with all of your CDs, your computer equipment, and your pet cat -- all of which, they'll remind you, is proof that not only have you broken the law but you've broken it so horribly that the scope of your crime perhaps surpasses that of the rapists and murderers currently incarcerated across the world.
If you have any balls, you'll tell them to fuck the fuck off and drop your cat -- or else.
They agree. Sure, they say and drop the cat -- but not your computer equipment. All you need to do, fuckface, is sign this form.
And they'll give you a form to sign authorizing them -- Jeff the junior g-man and his frat-boy buddy, Tyler -- to charge your credit card 10,000 dollars.
Then you'll be left with a bunch of yanked power cords, a broken down swivel chair that you've used to compute on for six years, and a frazzled pet cat.
Seriously: is Puff Daddy aware of how fucking stupid a name like 'Puff Diddy' is?
I mean, really.
Am i missing something here? Is there anything *not* stupid about the word -- or, worse yet, the *name* -- "Diddy?"
Sure, we've all sung diddies, but I defy anyone to deny that they've not cringed whenever they've actually admitted that they've sung a "diddy". It's something you admitted to your grandmother when you were in the third grade and asked you what you did in school for music. "Do you sing diddies?" your grandma asks. "Yes," you say. "We sing diddies." But you're in the third grade, for chrissake! And you're talking to an old person who doesn't see anything wrong with the word.
(She's the same person that asks you, one night at the dinner table, if you're a gay and happy boy, and you admit -- to her only -- that, yeah, you're gay. But it's "gay" in the happy way -- "I'm so happy! I'm so gay!" -- not gay in the way that gets you beat up on the playground. But this is all for the benefit of your grandmother -- slow-moving, slightly crocked, but lovable -- and has nothing to do with the hard, cruel, real world outside of the domain of your grandma.)
Yes. I know. This is off-topic. See my post about the cat and g-men above. That's on topic. Napster. Acoustic fingerprinting. Napster is fucked. Is this a surprise?
As I understand it, swapping music non-commerically between friends is legally okay, right?
So how about this for a music-sharing system? There's a little client that lets you enter up to 16 friends with whom you are willing to share music. These should be real-world people that you know, like, and trust.
Now, when you request a song, the request goes to the 16 people you know. If they don't have it, they forward the request to THEIR friends, without revealing your identity. Eventually the song is found and passed back friend-to-friend to the requester. Everything is kept all crypty. There are potocol issues, but yada-yada...
The "friends list" has a few advantages:
Or does Freenet already do all this? :-)
Almost every post in this forum ought to be moderated -1, Offtopic. Except for a couple anon posts stuck at 0 and 1, there's almost nothing actually discussing the topic of the article. I've seen all the "Napster Bad/Good" bullshit before. If I wanted someone's decree about what I should use my computer for, I'd ask Microsoft.
/.'s immense readership, someone would. Apparently not-- apparently there are simply a few hundred thousand people who want to discuss the morality and legality of Napster for the millionth fucking time.
What I was HOPING to find here was something about the reliability of this fingerprinting technology, possible ways to foil it, Napster's future plans for the service, etc.. I don't have those details. But I was hoping that with
Remember all the talk of audio watermarking and the other (debatably) "unaudable" copy-identification techniques? Well, it's time to use those on your own music to screw this thing up. In its pure form, audio ID'ing is cool. It's like CDDB for mp3s. Download something, and you can be sure it's not some wanker who named all his stuff "Orbital - Peel Sessions", or whatever you're looking for.
But if you need to get around this? Bam. A tool that adds 0.5 seconds of silence will totally screw Relatable's algorithm, last I checked. Past that, it's the same old story -- a war between the modifiers and the filterers. Napster's gone from being somewhat useful to totally useless. Long live Gnutella and Freenet.
Well it this case, this is probably more problematic in terms of classical music, where you can argue how well the performance is. But you could also see this with a cover band, where they play the tune well enough, but just a little off speed.
and heck, if you take a piece and more it just one or two percent faster, so that the feel is a little bit punchier, and obviously doesn't match the original version. the signature might not pick up on this
In the classical example, you would literally have a performance that never took place. It is more acceptable in classical because there are discussions about what are the correct performance values. And they would have to track down the original recording, which doesn't exist in the form they are expecting.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
That said, I wonder how much of a audio signature is retained when you play with or edit the file.
For example, in classical music you sometimes have performances that are excellent, but which are basically at the wrong tempo as far as you are concerned. One instance of this is the first section of the Eroica Symphony (by Beethoven) which is marked to be at a speed that is stunningly fast. You can tweak the speed easily enough in a midi file, and find something close enough that it sounds convincing. But live performances are not usually done at that speed, they are usually somewhat slower. With appropriate audio software, you can take a very high fidelity copy wav file of the music, and change the speed of the music without screwing up the pitch.
[just for the info, the average speed of perfomance is this exact piece is usually 100 to 130 beats per minute, when the spec is 180. 170 or so sounds best to me.]
You now have a performance by an orchestra that never actually took place. Would the audio signature be different? Would it even be a different copyright, especially if you invested alot of work fine tuning the tempi of the individual sections?
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Have you been paying attention? The last people who are going to see any money from any new revenues generated from internet music distribution are the artists. First comes Napster, then the RIAA, then the lawyers, then the executives, then the label's agents, then marketing, then production, THEN the artist.
I do not have a signature
If this means Napster can offer a subscription service, and compensate artists based on what's shared, and thereby continue to exist and offer MP3s and not some Windows Media shite, I would be thrilled. Where do I sign up?
sulli
RTFJ.
What if they're using it to pay the artists based on the share of music downloaded? I would think it would make lots of sense in that case.
sulli
RTFJ.
What if they're using it to pay the artists based on the share of music downloaded? I would think it would make lots of sense in that case.
sulli
RTFJ.
I would *love* if they did this!
Imagine, me downloading Delerium's Silence, and then asking the server for other songs with similar fingerprints?
Now I can search across the spectrum!
Or I can encode my own songs for Napster, say my fav CDs, and then get other hits for similar music!
I'd love to find music that sounds like Chrono Cross "Time of the Dreamwatch". Yet I don't know how. Or songs that sound like Ah! My Goddess, melancholy and sentimental.
I dunno, if they use it to actually characterize songs, for filtering purposes, they can also use it for searching and indexing purposes too!
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
Here's the basic solution. Put the music through a narrow bandpass filter. That is, remove all frequencies except those in a narrow band, say 800Hz to 1000Hz. It probably makes more sense to locate this band in the lower octaves. Then, go through the song looking for the presence or absence of a signal. Turn this into a string of 1's and 0's where a 1 means that there's some noise with a frequency in the range and 0 if there's only a neglible amount. Then do string matching. You might need to slide this back and forth a bit to find the best match, but that's not too complicated.
IRC is probably in the same boat, it is largely the domain of Unix users. If AOL doesn't offer it you can bet the masses stay away.
do_ramble(Mp3 Napster)
{
Anyone who's watching poster names will find this a bit redundant coming from me, but what the hell
It has become appauling clear that Napster execs did very poorly in their highschool history classes.
Before the mp3 craze (I am still cautious about the word revolution) music was obtainable illegaly only with great difficulty. Ok, not great difficulty, but it was a hassle. Then came the MP3. The grip of the record industry on copy right loosened. The customers were freeer to pick and choose among thousands of artists. With the RIAA crackdown on Napster and the MP3 community, these freedoms evaporated.
Now why am I using the word freedom? These things I'm talking about are not freedoms in any technical respect. But, and this is the important part, they seemed that way to the users of the product, especialy those who are not familiar with copyright law.
Now history teaches us that when you take freedoms away from people bad things happen. This model is paralell to the Soviet Union's problems. (Before I launch into this, I am not equating the RIAA to Joseph Stalin nor am I saying that the two experiances are even remotely similar. Mearly that they work on the same model). Stalin's opression of the Soviet people sets the stage, just as the origional difficulty in copying and sampleing music does in the current model. After Stalin the pressure slowly came off the people of the USSR as their freedoms returned (slowly). Sililarly, as Mp3 caught on, more and more people began to use encoders etc, and the utilities became readily available. Gorbachev's attempted crackdown however, demonstrated that, once the pressure is off it must stay off. Revolts erupted, and the government was overthrown. In our paralell model we are coming on to this last stage. The RIAA is cracking down and these privilages that so many "netizens" are used to are evaporating. Open Nap is one responce, but I expect to see something more revolutionary than that.
Many have said that the tens of millions of people on the net who download and love their MP3s could form a powerfull lobby. I wonder if that will even come to fruition.
return 0;
}
This has been another useless post from....
Killfile(TGK)
No trees were killed in the creation of this post. However, many electrons were inconvenienced.
How doable is this really? What if I'm a member of a metallica cover band who strives to sound like the real thing? Can this fingerprinting software tell the difference? I doubt it. This filter should be no more effective than speech recognition software. And to be legally safe, they'll have to block the greatest common denominator. Better to unintentionally block some legal-to-trade stuff than to unintentionally not block copyrighted stuff, right?
And here's an idea... what if someone writes software to encrypt an mp3? with a winamp plugin or hacked napster client of some kind to decrypt? Will they block files they can't get a signature on? How can they tell the difference between a song with a "wrong" looking signature and, say, an mp3 with sound effects?
While I agree that music piracy is wrong, there's a lot of grey. I use napster to replace 80s music I listened to in high school. Those tapes I had are long gone. But I did once pay for that music. So is it illegal? The recording industry would probably argue that it is. But I'm not so sure that's The Right Thing, even if it is illegal.
I think the recording industry is fighting a losing battle. The legal game playing can only go on for so long. And sooner or later, they'll kill napster outright. But that's wont be the end of the war. Right or wrong, the recording industry will lose this war. Maybe they should embrace the new technology so that they can steer it in a direction that's more compatible with their business models.
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.
Graham's Number, a number so huge it needs its own notation, a number that dwarfs Littlewood's Number (10 ^ 10 ^ 34), is the upper bound for a problem to which most people think the answer is 6.
How many different songs are there? I don't know. But apparently there are less than 2^128.
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Yes, the nick is flamebait
Hey, this could help with the problem "What's the song that goes mmm-mmm-m-mmm?". Simply hum a few bars, take the acoustic fingerprint and query Napster's db for the artist, songwriter and song title.
It should also put an upper limit on creativity. If there are only 128 bits in the fingerprint then there are only 2^128 possible songs.
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Yes, the nick is flamebait
The good news:
People posting bruce springsteen songs labelled as metallica will get filtered out.
The better news:
People coughing into the microphone as a prelude to pirated music will get filtered in.
You gotta love it. Let me digitally fingerprint your analog data.
Now, if they're doing true, really good pattern/voice recognition, then they may actually cause the Napster crowd some problems.
I wonder if they'll filter out Puff Daddy songs because they contain samples from Sting?
(REJECTED: Song Recognized: The Police, "Every Breath You Take")
heh.