Slashdot Mirror
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.
if(md5sum("myfile.mp3") == md5sum("Limp_Bizkit-Crap.mp3")
cout "PIRATE!";
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.
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
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!
Uh? Fanning made Napster. Literally.
My Journal - 1,337 fans and countin
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