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Napster, Audio Fingerprinting, and the Future of P2P
mjmalone writes "Napster founder Sean Fanning is poised for a comeback, seems the now 22 year old Fanning has developed technology which creates "audio fingerprinting" of individual tracks and compares them against fingerprints in his firm's database to determine legality. A fee may be set and collected on a copyrighted track by its rightful owner. Fanning is actively recruiting industry support as well as pushing the idea to p2p services such as kazaa and grokster. " This isn't exactly new technology, but it's still interesting to see what Fanning is up to these days besides movie cameos.
You have to give him credit. At least someone out there is actually trying to make p2p legit, and not just throwing their weight around *cough* RIAA *cough*
if(md5sum("myfile.mp3") == md5sum("Limp_Bizkit-Crap.mp3")
cout "PIRATE!";
Will it be able to tell the diff between...
:)
Backstreet boys, N'Sync and other boy bands?
Creed, Nickleback and other "rock bands"?
50-cent and DMX?
I wonder if record companies will accept mistakes when differentiating between these artists
--
"I'm not bright. Big words confuse me. But Wanda loves me and that should be enough for you." - Cosmo
I recall that in its dying days Napster was talking about adding this to appease the recording industry. The variation then was from a company called Relatable. Sounds like Shawn is stuck in a recursive loop.
Why I don't think it would work, just quoting from the article:
Another issue is that it would be up to the labels to claim ownership of each track, and they may claim greater rights than they are entitled to or rights that are subject to dispute. Many songs have multiple rights holders, depending on who wrote the composition and who performed it, and the labels and the artists signed to them have frequent ownership disagreements.
For example, many of the songs on file-sharing networks are recordings of live performances, whose digital distribution rights and royalties might have to be negotiated between labels and artists.
Umm no.
This is not going to make P2P "legit".
This is going to further destroy legit and non infringing usage of P2P. Now, RIAA will still say "p2p has no purpose other than piracy ban it"! And if people start paying for music from these services, guess what LEGITIMATE users of p2p suffer.
Sean Fanning did not invent P2P. Before napster we used to have IRC/DCC bots etc. and web search pages. Sean Fanning made downloading mp3's easier for the masses because of his windows client that automagically shared files you had downloaded. He's great but he's no God.
I remember seeing a book once that helped you identify songs by whether the sequence of notes at the beginning of the piece went up, down or stayed the same pitch when compared to the previous note. It was about the size of a telephone directory.
A quick Google finds out that its called The Parson's Code, with a lot more information here.
Presumably the fingerprinting scheme works in a similar fashion (over a larger portion of the song, and probably over multiple fragments of the song as well).
Ian.
A physicist is an atom's way of thinking about atoms
Such people don't "change sides" or comit "treason". They don't have any morales at all and work basically for any bloke who has money in his pockets. And Fanning thinks that this bloke is the music industry. I wonder, however, if they'll take him. Elephants are said to have good memory and to be unforgiving.
And for this P2P thing: does anyone here really think at the music industry will just lean back and watch their profits flush aways through DSL customer lines ?
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
Or P2P networks could NOT verify "legality," NOT pay Fanning anything, remain distributed enough to avoid any serious legal problems, shift the responsibility (rightfully) onto users, and music will remain -- as it was and ever shall be -- completely free.
Avast, me hearty! Arrrr!
before the "audio fingerprint" changes? Say, speed it up by 5%, filter out some of the bass and drum, and profit.
Karma: Food Fight (Mostly affected by Date Plate).
What if you introduced a little bit of static or something into the MP3? Not enough to be annoying, or maybe even really perceptible, but just enough to throw the "fingerprinting" off. I wonder if the technology is good enough to detect that. Also, if you were to record a song from vinyl, clean it up, and post it online, it might be different from the "official" version of the file. Maybe the technology might be able to detect the general pattern of the song, rather than exact sounds, but if not, Fanning's technology might not work out.
I produce electronic music and write little games. Have a look.
So you have a way of authenticating that a song is legitimately bought? An audit trail for each track? Wonderful. It's not going to be taken apart and cracked within a week is it? No-one's going to take our model and release a free implementation with much wider popular appeal are they? Are you sure? Great! We'll buy your company and give you generous stock options then.
...
Please excuse me now, my pet unicorn needs feeding
"It's not your information. It's information about you" - John Ford, Vice President, Equifax
They will expect all the cash that Napster 2 might make to go to them and have all the other p2p networks follow suit or the RIAA will keep pestering them till they do...
Reminds me of that rich kid in school who used to pick on kids for money (even though he had plenty for lunch)... Let's just say the RIAA will be going in the way of this kid: One day, all the other kids (p2p users in this case) got together gave him a swirley, and made him walk home in his tighty whiteys... No one was suspended because then they would have to throw out the whole school. In the end we all just had to write "I will not fight in school" 100 times which was well worth it. Ahhh the meories...
Business \Busi"ness\, n.;
A scam in which all people involved perceive as beneficial...
He has a good business plan: create a big problem, then solve it.
I use the MusicBrainz tagger sometimes, and it works by comparing the audio signature of a song to the one in its database. This seems like the same sort of idea, but MusicBrainz tags files completly wrong a good percentage of the time, even listing the wrong artist - title info as a 100% match. I think this kind of technology has a ways to go before it could hold up in court or whatever.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
the cat's already out of the bag. The real issue here is the existence of the middleman in the music industry. Prices of CDs are artificially inflated by the middleman (the music outfits behind the RIAA), because they control most of the musical output in this country. Consumers want this music, and some continue to purchase at these inflated prices. But when you can get the same music, albeit illegal, from an alternate provider (KaZaA et al.), why bother paying those prices at all?
The solution is to bring the price of music back down to a reasonable level. If consumers are able to more directly compensate the artist for their music, and they can do so at a more granular level (i.e purchase tracks, vs CDs), and the easy of use is comparable to the p2p networks, then I bet you'll see a rebound in purchases. Granted, not all the people who use p2p will buy legit copies -- but I bet you'll see a significant rebound.
This country is long overdue for some overhauls on copyright / fair use law. The RIAA likens consumers who use p2p as criminals, but the RIAA backers have already been convicted for price fixing and routinely screw the artists they purport to represent out of cash. Criminals calling their target market criminals? Even if they're right, it's a matter of the pot calling the kettle black.
The days where the music industry could rob consumers without consequence is coming to an end. Exactly how it turns out is anybody's guess, but consumers are on to the RIAA's schemes and have a found a way to get their music without their shenanigans. Expect to see year-over-year sales to continue to fall until some of these leviathans go belly-up, and artists gain more control over production and licensing -- the way it should be.
The concept of audio "fingerprinting" is an interesting one, but likely outside of Fanning (and his local folks) experience or abilities. Fingerprinting has to rely on one of two things. The first is the artificialities of files -- things like file length, name, checksums, etc etc. All of these are easily overcome, and likely not robust to differing compression/bit rates/etc. The second thing it could reply on is data content -- that is, things like how many beats per minute, the time/frequency pattern in segment(s) X, Y, etc etc. I'll call this analysis of content. Unfortunately, simple analysis of content and watermarking schemes are very easily detected and overcome (remember the Felten/audio protection challenge?). TRUE analysis of content (when certain instruments play, their timing, the singing, etc) is a very difficult signal processing problem that won't be overcome without serious mathematics. And as much as I like Fanning, I don't think he's got the juice for it. Just my $0.02
MusicBrainz already has a free music fingerprint program. It identified about 60-70% of my songs correctly. It also will rename your files and update the ID tags.
The 30-40% it did not find... I could easily find by doing some searching manually through the program.
It was a nice way to completely identify my mp3 collection. Yes, it's a legal collection, but I wanted an easy way to rename the files and id tags.
Anyhoo... the program is pretty buggy so save often. Help the cause.
Enjoy.
DavaK
William Wallace: Unite us! Unite the Clans!
(said to Robert the Bruce)
I'd love to see how anyone could get every player in the music industry to agree on a delivery method for music-over-IP, once and for all. Shawn Fanning could be the one to spark it, unfortunately the article is scant on the technical details.
I gotta admit, this article gives me an "aw shucks, wouldn't that be nice" kinda warm and fuzzy feeling...until the record company guys start quibbling at the end of the article. I shiver every time any record label guy talks about "what the users want".
Of course, Fanning's system would still require voluntary compliance on the part of the enduser (as there will always be a way to copy music for free). I wonder what the enduser fees and resulting royalty percentages will be? Hopefully Kazaa, et al makes out better than a webcaster did under that webcasting royalty scheme. IMHO I would love to see the return of Napster, simple and spyware free for the Windows masses.
It's a great plan for unsigned bands if they can be distributed for free alongside fee-based music (say, Metallica). That's for damn sure.
Vonnegut: "What is the purpose of life? To be the eyes, ears, and conscience of the Creator of the Universe, you fool."
What good is this going to do?
I thought the whole filesharing problem comes from people wanting to download music for free instead of paying for it. IMHO, the problem is not that there is trouble IDENTIFYING copyrighted songs, it's that it's hard to get people to PAY for them.
Imagine this -- you have a network that identifies what you try to upload, and if it determines that the file is copyrighted, it charges you a fee. What do you do? Well, what did millions of people do when Napster tried to limit what you could share? Simple: They go to other, freer networks and leave the more limited one in the dust, awaiting bankruptcy.
The technology of audio fingerprinting can be very cool when used in other ways... like, perhaps, a more forgiving method (compared to checksums) to make sure a song is the real deal. Or, like some company is doing, enabling cell phone callers to call in with a song playing in the background and have a database identify the song name for them.
Unfortunately, I fail to see how this technology will discourage people from sharing files. We already KNOW which songs are copyrighted. It's just a matter of convincing people to pay for them. To accomplish that, I believe there needs to either be some way to discourage users from not paying (such as the RIAA's legal actions) or, preferably, some incentives to make people WANT to buy legal music (supporting your artists, ease of use/ease of finding the right song, download speed, song quality, etc., but all at a reasonable price).
Crippling filesharing networks to prevent sharing is a stupid, ineffective solution. As history has shown, people will simply use other networks. Unless the RIAA can completely crack down on and close ALL the networks, nothing will change. If there is just ONE free network, it's the one people will migrate to and use.
Shawn Fanning's cameo appearance in The Italian Job. It appears as though the more popular spelling of his name is "Shawn" instead of "Sean".
Audio fingerprinting is not something like a hash function that leads to a deterministic identifier. It is more like a web search engine that finds the best fuzzy match.
If you use audio fingerprint scores in the aggregate, for example to see what's popular, it works. If you depend on any one audio fingerprint matchup being accurate, especially accurate enough to use for legal notices, it doesn't make sense.
Music is a semantic object. Saying whether two pieces of music are the same thing depends on stuff that even humans have a hard time figuring out, like how much originality there is in a tribute band's cover.
Ultimately, it will be up to the consummer to choose if something is worth paying or not. Those intelligent enough to understand that their favourite artist needs cash to survive will pay whatever they deem appropriate or a reasonnable fixed price. As long as content is available on the internet, forget trying to control it. And even if you wanted to enforce copyright laws, you can't prove that the targetted ip/account hasn't been hijacked/trojaned and/or it was a specific person behind the computer.
As soon as there's no longer a need for a central server to achieve Napster's peak performance (which was nothing short of impressive), good bye RIAA and whatever power they think they have.
have you been defaced today?
Like the article mentions the concept of finger printing music using a beats and tones method is nothing new.
The concept of using it to enforce p2p transactions quickly falls down though. It is obviously impractical to design any sort of p2p system that would require the content to be uploaded to a central server for authentication and beat matching. Any system that relied on client trust for the content matching could be easily circumvented, and would be by a community that has been built on the desire to pirate this music in the first place.
Why someone would want to use an application like kazaa to buy thier music in the first place is beyond me anyway. Who wants to pay a record company for a song that's been encoded by an unknown party, often at lower bitrates and without quality encoding software. And to be sure, people do not use current p2p systems because they find them to be the best designed, or best UI, or easiest. They do it to pirate the music.
The future of pay for download systems rests firmly in the professionally produced content, delivered from server to client such as iTunes and Rhapsody. You can always include peer bandwidth augmentation of official downloads, though i would expect thats not really nescesary.
Trying to monetize p2p is a red herring.
Sean's business model seems a tad flawed. His new software has already been written, and an SDK is freely available here. Source code for both the Linux and Windows clients (which includes the fingerprinting code) is a click away under their downloads section. Redhat and Debian packages are there too, as well as Ruby and Perl bindings.. so fire up apt-get and go to it!
Perhaps we can take the time to look at the root causes of the whole P2P/ music industry / RIAA debacle. We all know the context. But what are the hidden assumptions? Can we reanalyse these? And can we find a new model for buying and selling digital media that does not pit the greedy tycoons against the valiant hackers? I think so...
1. The first assumption is that consumption is completely elastic. In other words, people will pay whatever the goods they want cost. (Assumption of the media industry.)
2. The second is that value is constant. In other words, digital theft by a million people is equal to physical theft of a million CDs.(Assumption of the media industry, who come up with bizarre figures as to the "loss" sustained thanks to illegal file sharing.)
3. The third is that digital content has no value. In other words, digital theft is not theft because bits and bytes have no value. (Assumption of the file swappers.)
All these assumptions are wrong.
First, consumption is almost completely inelastic. People will spend every disposable penny they have. If goods are cheaper, they will buy more of them. Raising the price of goods simply decreases demand.
Secondly, value is not just constant, it is almost always inversely proportional to rarity. In other words, the more of an item is available, the less it is worth.
Thirdly, of course digital content has value: that people go to great lengths to aquire it demonstrates this. However, its value is subject to the law of rarity.
What does this all mean?
Firstly, whether or not people illegally share music (and the same applies to movies), the value of media is going down inexorably thanks to the huge volume produced. And I'm not speaking of the cost of manufacture, but the perceived value, the price people are willing to pay. Diamonds cost practically nothing to produce, their value comes from their rarity.
Secondly, an industry faced with this value equation has several options. They can try to restrict supply and eliminate competition, which is what the music industry has done for about 20 years since the CD eliminated the production bottleneck. In a competitive market they will lower their prices so that consumers stay loyal. We have also seen this. Finally, they can ignore reality and die.
Thirdly, one of the ironies about digital distribution is that it eliminates the rarity variable. This means that any object distributed digitally will inevitably tend towards zero. I can download music from the Net but I value my own (irreplacable) CD collection much more.
I believe that even the 'pay as you go' model is doomed to failure. The only sustainable model is one in which prices are set by the market and production by the producers.
So, what I propose (or rather, predict, for this is almost inevitable) is a media market that works as follows:
1. The producer of a work creates a specific number of instances of the work. This can be as large or small as they want, but they cannot change the quantity afterwards.
2. The instances are individually serialized so as to be traceable to their owner. They can be copied freely.
3. These instances are now auctioned and can be resold in an open market.
This scheme can be applied to music, writing, photographs, almost any digital creation. Imagine a famous writer produces a short story. They issue a series of 1000. Now, you can buy one of these copies. It will be, forever, an original that is certified and unlosable. The price is set by auction, and the rights to these copies can be traded in an open market. What's the cost of a 2003 Madonna? Around $1.20, these days. And a 1998 Leftfield? Up to $30, if you can get them. In fact, you have paid not for a real thing, but for a slice of rarity. Sound strange? What about shares and options...?
There is only one requirement for such a market, and that is the market place. All the rest follows from the natural laws of supply and demand.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
before the RIAA finds it necessary to monitor distributed file sharing. it's not beyond them to contact isps to find out whos ip address was 117.43.41.39 at some time. then of course, legal trouble is directed towards hundreds of people, not just one company. i support file sharing in its way now, but, eventually were going to be whipped enough, that we MUST use some service. it's the american way.
I write code.
Beat me any my friends at a game of caps last night... there is no end to his talents ;-)
Great idea, Shawn, but it'll never be accepted. I know your heart's in the right place, and your bank account is feeling a little light, but this won't fix any of that.
First, you expect p2p users to submit to this willingly. Ummm...so, right now, they can steal all the music they want for free, but they're going to jump on your wagon and let spyware into their p2p programs. I'll eat my hat before I ever see spyware in Kazaa!
Most damningly, though, is that you expect the RIAA to go along with your plan, too. The problem is, they've got you in their sites as Pirate in Chief #1 with a bullet. They're never going to turn the keys over to you...that'd be as crazy as if Captain Pickard let that little Wil Wheaton character fly his spaceship. Fat chance of ever seeing that happen. Simply put, to stop pirates, the RIAA needs more power than they have now, and more power than they can get from your software. The only real solution has to come from government. Perhaps some kind of system whereby if the RIAA finds pirated music or movies, or movies about pirates, or songs that feature peg-legs or the word "arr!" in them, they'd be free to destroy your computer. Something like that might actually work, and just might make the world profitable for music producers again. We need a federal Department of Music Security, headed by Hillary Rosen to put an end to audio terrorists like Shawn here once and for all.
Consensual sex is boring.
But audio fingering printing is very much a reality, and nobody uses a check sum.
There are many good papers on this.. I particularly like the one on "AudioDNA" visit your local google. You see with Audio Fingering Printing we are actually able to take a song that has been rerecorded onto an analog tape, slightly time stretched and still be able to tell that its the original song. It doesn't rely on bytes, but instead qualities of the audio signal.
There are many ways to do this, but one solid method is to analysis the audio signal for acoustic events that are resistant to change. Make a listing of these events and store there locations in time as a chain. Even if you only have a small segment of the chain you can search for it with techniques similar to the one's they use in biology (nobody looks for a complete DNA chain). Its a little difficult to explain without knowing something about signal processing so I suggest just searching the web. Here are a few good topics:
Music Information Retrival - (MIR)
Audio Finger Printing
Audio DNA
CUIDADO
ISMIR
MPEG-7
Oh and try not to insult all the people who research this stuff by claiming some goof at Napster invented it.
Rob
How about regenerating the waves, then making a fourier transform on it, then use some algorithm to transform that 10 to 20 32 digits integer, different enough for many song that it would not find too much false positive... Ok maybe the spectre between two hard rock song isn't too much different. Does someone knows ?
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Sure- I'll volunteer all my files to be tested by some random company, and they can tell me whether I owe them money or broke the law in some way.
Just contact me here: Hao_Wu@not-likely-to-happen.com, care of GET FUCKED.
I suggest you read Slashdot
Nothing is worse than somebody who is too stupid to realize that their 15 minutes are up.
On Wall Street they say "buy low, sell high" On the pad we say, "buy high, sell high" Isn't that somehow better?
Also, does anybody anybody use winamp anymore?
I still use Winamp 2.8... back when it was good.
Actually, does anybody use Winamp 3 now? It sucked when it came out, has it gotten any better?
[SIG] It's like putting a moose in the blender -- a recipe for disaster!
About these 'fingerprints' - are they SIMILAR for similar pieces of music? Or are they only useful for identifying the one piece of music that each fingerprint is for?
If the 'fingerprints' are similar enough, you could ALSO use the technique to search for songs that you may have never heard but match the general style of music that you like. Sounds like something independent musicians could really benefit from ("Hey, I'd never heard of THESE guys before, but their music is exactly the style that I like....")
And if this is NOT the case, is anyone working on a "music style" analysis of some sort that could be stored in a 'searchable' fashion? (i.e. take your favorite song, run it through an analysis program to get it's 'fingerprint', then feed that 'fingerprint' to a search engine to get a listing of similar songs...)
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
./ - do you think your readers are that stupid? y not provide some wide research data on the subject of the article while you're at it? (Newbies might think it's this 22 y.o. boy's invention)
girl
As a class project, a friend and I built a music recognition database. You can read our paper.
The general approach is fairly straightforward. You extract a set of "features" (typically several Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients, or MFCCs) from each sample of the song, say 10ms. You then pick several (say, 16) arbitrary points and iteratively generate that many "average" feature vectors, along with their weights so that they all sum to a one vector. This data is turned into a Hidden Markov Model (HMM). To see what audio you have, you run it through each of the possible HMMs and see which produces the greatest likelihood.
This method is typically applied to speaker recognition, where a linear search through HMMs is reasonable. This obviously isn't the case when you know about hundreds of thousands of songs, so a large part of the challenge is narrowing the field of HMMs to check (which is one of the focuses in our paper). Relatable, who were working with Napster a long time ago, have clusters that can classify 1,000 songs per second; I'm pretty sure they use this technique.
This technique has several important features. First, it doesn't depend on any properties of files themselves. Checksums would be trivial to beat, looking at a file's length could be circumvented by inserting silence, etc. Since this creates an average of sample data, a song would need to be changed quite a bit to fail to match. (The system is robust to, for instance, changes in bitrate, slowing the music down, and rearranging bits of the song or putting it in reverse.) We didn't have enough "derivative" music to test how it handles sampled music vs. the original -- it depends how much is changed.
Finally, this sort of system is useful for much more than song identification. You can build a model for an artist or genre and determine how to classify the song. One of my focuses in the paper is unsupervised genre classification -- my tests indicated some fairly reasonable groupings. This technique could be used for music recommendation -- "You like Dropkick Murphys? Well, they sound like Flogging Molly, so you might want to check them out."
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
Diamonds cost practically nothing to produce, their value comes from their rarity.
:-)
Interesting comparison. Do some reading about DeBeers. They pretty much restrict diamond supply worldwide to keep the prices up. The music industry is trying to pull off the same thing, but it's much harder to restrict bytes than rocks.
For some reason, demand for real diamonds is high, too. Science is now able to create diamonds that are molecularly nearly identical to natural diamonds. I asked a lady friend if she would care if a diamond in her ring was natural or created, even if they were completely identical and she said she did care. No wonder I'm not married. I'm way too practical. I can't see why anyone would want several thousand dollars of nonintrinsic value on their hand when it could be spent much more practially or enjoyably.
I can't figure out if DeBeers engineered that in her head or society in general.
There is only one requirement for such a market, and that is the market place. All the rest follows from the natural laws of supply and demand.
You know, you could've saved me a lot of reading and just posted that.
I agree. It's that simple. There's a value the consumers are willing to pay for and a value producers are willing to produce. When all the dust settles, the meeting point of those two lines will be the price(s) and product(s).
Movies Shawn Fanning has appeared in: Italian Job, The (2003) .... Himself
Any others?
John Kerry is a Joke!
I was wondering if that was really him in the movie... it's hardly off topic, since it was mentioned in the article.
Most audio traded on the internet is MPEG or OGG already. The fact of the matter is in the encoding process they already go through enough transformations (SEE: Mal frequency cepstrum coeffcient and filtering) to use the data for this kind of analysis.
A good paper to check out would be Nakajima et al "A Fast Audio Classification From MPEG Encoded Data"
Also do a google for "MAAATE". Its an API for EXACTLY this purpose and its OPEN SOURCE (woot!).
Kind Regards,
Rob
Of course people might not be willing to openly sell counterfeit copies if there's an audit trail, but it will be possible for resellers to "fork" a legitimate artifact by selling multiple copies, each of which appear to be legitimate because it will have an audit trail leading back to the original seller. Unless every resale is somehow tied to the seller's legal identity, illegitimate copies will gradually "leak" into the legitimate market.
Hey--you are confusing "price" with "value". Get it straight, or go rant somewhere else. Preferably the latter.
Unfortunately, you are forgetting that modern marketing techniques seriously warp the basic supply/demand relationship. Successfull businesses today do not find out what people want and give it to them. They instead create a demand in people for something and then supply that. People are not rational and, as has been demonstrated by the huge marketing machine that is modern media, they are easily induced into pointless consumer frenzy.
There are some cool examples of similar things...
Humdrum
or
folkfull
Rob
Dear Slashdot Family, Typically, I refrain from ever posting on Slashdot, despite my regular visits, mainly because you guys are usually talking over my head, but in the case of the RIAA/P2P fight, you're right up my alley. Very recently, my company released an ongoing series of video shorts on Kazaa/Altnet featuring footage of Hawaiian Tropic models with original music soundtracks. Although we just started, prospects look promising. Ergo, everybody involved in this process, so far, is pleased. We're even considering including independent recording artists music tracks, and offering them a royalty on sales. If 50 examples like this surfaced, say, in the next 60 days, wouldn't this be the key argument against the RIAA? i.e., content providers selling entertainment voluntarily using P2P? How could they continue to claim a position of "artists interest" if independents used P2P in a lucrative way? In my view, the only issue from the RIAA's perspective is - even if they don't say it upfront - they just don't want to lower their prices. They don't want to adjust to this intense force in the free market. Where would the software industry be if it spent this much time and money "fighting piracy"? Just some thoughts, SoSoHot.com
Audio fingerprinting could help p2p a lot. For instance right now gnutella uses a hash to find duplicate copies of the same file to give you multiple download sources. Using an audio fingerprint you could search for other copies of the same song that aren't identical byte for byte but who's name didn't meet your search criteria. But obviously you can't download from multiple sources that aren't byte for byte copies of each other.
Now all we need is something to do video fingerprinting and document finger printing.
If you had simply left your statement as "digital content has no value" then you might have had the basis for an intelligent discussion (vis-a-vis bits have value, but can be duplicated for no appreciable cost).
-- Shamus
Bleah!
What is it going to do? Scan the user's hard drive for MP3s and then send a report off to the mothership? A couple months go by and you get a bill in the mail for all the tracks on your hard drive? Even those you ripped yourself from your own CDs? And how about stuff it doesn't recognise? Will the user get a generic charge for those MP3s to be held in trust for the artist, should he ever be identified? How legal is that, scanning my hard drive and reporting the contents to someone else? Seems to me they'd have a difficult time defending it in court...
Sounds like anyone who used it would be asking for people to migrate to another P2P system that doesn't. Which means they'll try to sugar-coat it and spin it as some advanced new feature OR they'll bury it deep and hope that nobody finds it.
Either way, it sounds like a losing plan.
Father O'Malley,
Your music file "Angels We Have Heard On High.mp3" matches "Smack My Bitch Up" by The Prodigy in our audio fingerprint database. Our lawyers will be in contact with you about this infringement.
Sincerely,
Recording Industry Association of America
Individual people are rational. :P
Taste however is an entirely different story. I think wrestling and nascar are low forms of entertainment. But believe me, people like it and want more. Just because a current demand does not exist does not mean it cannot grow. And vice versa, something big could easily drop. Like Saturday Night Live.
It is retarded to think that marketing fools the average person into liking something they otherwise would not enjoy. Which is what I infer from your statements.
Britney Spears may be a very low and dumb form of music. And it is created by and marketed with a lot of financial backing. But a large group of people like it.
There are debs for libraries, but no debs with clients.
use a "polymorphic file compression" scheme - remember old-time polymorphic virii? let all P2P goods be protected from real-time censorbot analysis by encasing each file in a self-extractor that is encrypted with a randomly generated key, small enough to break in 5-10 min. on a typical machine. Real people would have no trouble, while censorbots would no longer be able to pattern-match.
I agree -- the RIAA serves to promote the acts it represents. I agree that the current manner in which they promote cannot continue, or at least on the scale of which it has until now. I agree that, even if the RIAA were to get flushed, the matter of promotion needs to be addressed. But I think such a situation demands a bit more sophistication from the artists themselves.
Artists could still make money, even without the RIAA. In fact, all they need is a halfway decent manner of peddling their wares. Concerts are the perfect example, even now -- the quality of a digital copy usually doesn't approach that of a live experience, and even then, the live experience has value that cannot be obtained through an MP3. And with the RIAA out of the way, even if each artists' sales are lower, the percentage of each dollar that could find its way into their pockets from each track / album sale would be AT LEAST one order of magnitude greater than the current situation. What does an artist make from a single album sale now -- $0.50? $1.00 if they're an AAA act and managed to get a good deal? Those figures seem pretty generous, and distribution / manufacturing costs aren't a significant factor anymore. Advertising and promotion (A&R) is the biggest, and that should be a fixed cost, which the artist should be advised of upfront.
The biggest issue is still how to strike a balance between fair use / file sharing (two sides of a coin) and providing an infrastructure (technological and legal) through which artists can protect their intellectual property and stand to profit from it. Art appreciation is all well and good, but at the end of the day, there's a difference between being able to enjoy an artist's work, and stealing it outright without compensating them. My biggest issue is that I have no way to compensate THEM; I want to make sure my money reaches them without subsidizing the careers of other crappy acts represented by the RIAA (Mariah Carey, Michael Jackson [post-BAD], etc).
Indeed, individual people are very rational. /.
Sometimes (often?) they base their decisions on incomplete information, which can reach into self-delusion. This does not make their decisions less rational.
For instance, people do not flock in matters tastes because they are irrational. Indeed, accepting the tastes of a group is very rational once you understand that this is easier and more effective than trying to establish your own tastes by trying products individually.
Consider the hard work that record critics do... few people can afford the time and money involved. So, following your friend's tastes is a good indicator of finding stuff you will like too.
We hate Britney Spears's music because she makes music for young things who don't have time for serious pursuits like working uh, playing on
Thinking of oneself as 'rational' and everyone else as 'irrational' just makes us blind to other people's motives and desires.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
I thought the whole filesharing problem comes from people wanting to download music for free instead of paying for it. IMHO, the problem is not that there is trouble IDENTIFYING copyrighted songs, it's that it's hard to get people to PAY for them
You nailed it! In other words...
You cannot deal with a social problem using a technological solution
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