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

bad precedent

[Fux the Pengiun]

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.