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.

Comments

Napster was adding this in its dying days...

[ergo98]

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.

The Parson's Code

[Ian Jefferies]

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.

Re:I'm not surprised about Fanning.

[TheKey]

Uh? Fanning made Napster. Literally.