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Legislators Looking At Peer to Peer Monitor
rocketjam writes "According to CNET News, a California based software company has developed a song-identification technology which could be incorporated into file sharing software. It would then monitor music being downloaded or made available in a shared folder, identify songs by a process which examines their 'psycho-acoustical' properties and then compare them to a copyright database and stop them from being traded if a match is found. Audible Magic, has been demoing its technology before legislators and regulators in Washington D.C for the past month. The RIAA is greatly enamored of the concept and has helped the company get access to government officials. However, the technology would obviously require the makers of file swapping software to add it into their products either voluntarily or through legislation."
Reminds me of the "identify a song recorded off the radio" feature of the Neuros mp3 player... Only evil... Really evil.
it looks like this company is using MuscleFish to do the matching - MuscleFish was a audio query-by-content startup with actual products, which they bought out.
in fact, then, what this suggests is that there was no market for what you are calling Songle, so the technology wound up being perverted for use in DRM enforcement...
MusicBrainz has been using these "TRM"s (essentially track ids) to identify music to correctly add ID3 tags to your music collection for some time.
The more people that use it, the more accurate and complete it becomes. It is basically a free CDDB replacement (the biggest one I think) but kind of works in reverse as well (matches mp3s to their associated CDs).
Kinda cool, check it out.
I.O.U One Sig.
No but the article seemed to mention legislators, and by inference legislation. It would have to be mandated.
But then you'd have to have it put into every web browser and FTP program and hey why not cp and mv while we're at it..
Heck, you know it just looks like this won't work without locking down the hardware, and I won't buy such non working stuff. So they'd have to legislate the hardware too, and then we're screwed. But I have some faith we won't get there. Er, hope at least...
Even if hard drives could do this (the original idea was rather a kind of tamper-resistant storage accessible only by certain applications, which I suppose could be eavesdropped on by either tapping the IDE channel, or by tracing the syscalls of the processes), the trivial workaround is to use any kind of encrypted filesystem.