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."

Comments

Gimme a break...

[Skyshadow]

"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."

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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Re:Gimme a break...

[Wah]

Please tell Morcheeba, Tranquility Bass, The Brooklyn Funk Essentials, Badly Drawn Boy and Brakeman Junction that I'm sorry I stole their music. But they might be happy to know that I now own their CD's. I know, I know, I should be a good consumer and wait for MTV or Clear Channel to tell me what music is good, but what can I say, I'm a dirty fucking thief.

(nice troll, BTW)
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Re:Gimme a break...

[rkent]

They have _no incentive at all_ to produce more and varied music.

Actually they do, in a way. Here's why. Although the casual listeners are much maligned for accepting whatever is shoveled at them, they'll only take any one thing for so long. This goes for particular songs and artists as well as entire genres. People actually DO get sick of hearing the same old thing over and over; they're always eager to jump on the next "big thing."

Finding/manufacturing that next big thing is the job of the record companies. Withing a genre, it's easier (like trying to bring up Linkin Park when Papa Roach goes out of fashion or whatever). With genres, though, it's much harder; for example, in the 90s, labels knew they could only milk "alternative/grunge" for so long, and they didn't know what was coming next. So it suited them to have their fingers in a little of everything, all the while jockeying for control of what the next big thing would be.

In your example, this certainly isn't 100 different albums selling 100K copies each; it's more like the 10 1-million sellers. But they produced those 100 other records to find the "right" ten, at a profit of about zero.

I expect the margin isn't quite what we expect. Of course, musicians still go through the ringer, I'm not endorsing this system, but I think the major labels are more desperate than we think.

Re:Gimme a break...

[Hacker Cracker]

Ah, the rapturous sound of the Slashdot troll...

Quoth the poster:

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.

Just because you call it stealing doesn't make it so. Even without Fair Use it isn't stealing. No matter how much you jump up and down and call people names, it still isn't stealing.

Just what is it then? Repeat after me. It's infringement. Infringement is not stealing. It's the IP cartels who have elevated copyright infringement to the status of plunder on the high seas--it just isn't the same thing no matter how badly they want it to be.

This has been a public service announcement. Thank you and good night.

-- Shamus

This space for lease. EZ terms!

What?

[BilldaCat]

What is this "Naptser" thing you talk about?

God, slashdot editors. I swear.

Opennap?

[Saige]

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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Re:Opennap?

[Saige]

I don't have a problem admitting there are songs on my HD that are NOT from albums I own. Quite a few are, either from my own rips, or from downloads off of Napster before I found a good mp3 ripper. There are also plenty of remixes of songs, rarities, etc, that I either didn't even know existed, or that I don't know where to get. And sure, some are single songs that I don't want the entire album.

One of the advantages of Napster is that it allows spur-of-the-moment searches of artists that I wouldn't bother digging around for on the web. It allows me to search, say, for remakes of songs by a certain artist, without knowing who might have done them. And all sorts of other things that I could not possibly do by checking out artist web sites, or a store that lets me listen to the music first (though I don't know of any that do that anymore). I can tell you that without Napster, I wouldn't have accidentally discovered Kinnie Starr, and bought both her CD's from her independent label. I wouldn't have stumbled across Rachel Sage while doing a search on "Lilith Fair", and bought her three.

My music purchases have went up by maybe a factor of five since I found Napster. I am not exaggerating here, as you suggest I am. Because I don't listen to the radio that much, so don't get a lot of exposure to new stuff, and I don't care for most of what I do hear.

It took my SO and I two years to fill the last 50 slots in our 200-disc CD changer. That's with both of our purchases, gifts, etc. That was before Napster. Since then, maybe 6 months, we've bought at least that many more. With a list of 20-30 we still want to buy.

I know what I'm doing is technically illegal, and I know the reasons behind it being that way. I don't have a drop of guilt about it though because I'm getting more music I like, and they're getting more money from me.
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Alternate technology

[Ledge Kindred]

Audio fingerprinting is actually kind of cool, so if you're interested in it, there's a free (as in GPL) technology from the eTantrum people here:

freetantrum.org

-=-=-=-=-

peer-to-peer versus friend-to-friend

[e_lehman]

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:

• By entering the system, you're not giving away your valuable Starcraft-playing bandwidth to random jerks out on the net. The only requests come from a small number of people who are your friends.
• Since only a few people request from you, you can manage your relationships with them in detail: give them only so many downloads at such-and-such times, etc.
• By taking advantage of real-world trust relationships, the system becomes much harder for RIAA to crack. Okay, RIAA goon gets the client. But he hasn't gained a thing; RIAA goons don't have any friends.
• Who exactly has committed a crime? My buddy requested a song. I gave it to him. Did he commit a crime? Did I? Isn't that legal? I'm sure the courts would eventually resolve this in some unpleasant way, but this sort of legal muddying still seems all to the good to me.

Or does Freenet already do all this? :-)

Re:peer-to-peer versus friend-to-friend

[Xylantiel]

This is obviously a troll, but this view seems so prevalent that it should be debunked.

Straight from the copyright code, my emphasis added:

Title 17 -- Copyright
Chapter 10 -- Digital Audio recording devices and media
Sec. 1008. Prohibition on certain infringement actions

No action may be brought under this title alleging infringement of copyright based on the manufacture, importation, or distribution of a digital audio recording device, a digital audio recording medium, an analog recording device, or an analog recording medium, or based on the noncommercial use by a consumer of such a device or medium for making digital musical recordings or analog musical recordings.

from: the real thing

The problem is of course that "noncommercial use" is subjective. With enough lawyering breathing can be considered commerical. I prefer to be reasonable and include making copies for friends as noncommercial.

Changing Audio Signatures?

[Alien54]

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. The fact of somebody else having power drivers them crazy. It is probably borderline psychotic. (certainly nuerotic)

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

Re:stupid business model...

[TGK]

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....

Name that tune

[Hilary Rosen]

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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