Napster, Audio Fingerprinting, and the Future of P2P

Posted by CmdrTaco on Sunday July 13, 2003 @03:17AM from the well-I'll-believe-it-when-I-see-it dept.

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.

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He is NOT making p2p legit by Anonymous Coward · 2003-07-13 03:28 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.