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MySpace to Use Audio Fingerprinting
dptalia writes "MacWorld reports that MySpace is going to start implementing audio fingerprinting to prevent copyrighted material from appearing on their site. The new technology will be used to review all uploads and prevent 'inappropriate' material from ever seeing the light of day."
How about the "fair use" dispute ?
You know, as in parody, for instance, to name but just ONE of the legitimate "false positives".
By reading this signature you agree to not disagree with the post you just read.
The 'article' is woefully low on information, apart from a mention of Gracenote MusicID being used. From Gracenote's own page (Its on mobile music recognition, but I assume the principle is the same):
How it Works
1. When music fans hear a song they want to identify, they tap a command on the phone keypad to start the audio recognition process, and then hold the phone up to the music source.
2. The phone captures a few seconds of the audio and extracts a waveform fingerprint of the snippet. The snippet can be from any section of the song, even the last few seconds.
3. The fingerprint is sent to the Mobile MusicID recognition service from the service provider that may be located anywhere in the world.
4. The Mobile MusicID recognition server compares the fingerprint to its database of reference fingerprints and responds with the exact match.
5. The artist, song title and related information, as well as content like album art and download links are relayed to the fan.
I can explain it for you, but I can't understand it for you.
http://www.gracenote.com/music/corporate/press/art icle.html/date=2006103000
Wincopy
the great part about it is that there will be a huge number of false positives since half the songs the big 5 put out are all the same.
-- lol pwned
I wonder how well this will actually work. Audio Fingerprinting is designed to be insensitive to most 'naturally occuring' music distortions such as encoding artifacts, noise and changes in equalization, but I don't know of any audio fingerprinting system that will work well when faced with people who are actively trying to evade detection. It won't be too difficult for a properly motivated MySpace user to find a set of filters that can be applied to any song that will allow the song to get a unique fingerprint, without actually changing how the song sounds. A quick trip through Audacity to apply a micro-pitch change, a little equalization, and perhaps a slight tempo change will probably do the trick. Of course, the folks over at Gracenote are pretty smart and may be able to adapt to evasions, but this will no doubt lead to even more sophisticated evasions. In the end I don't think it is possible to create a fingerprinting system that will be able to deal with people who are actively evading the system. In the end, the evaders will win.
But... we're talking about MySpace, not YouTube?
I think this is where the confusion comes in...
Its ok because they analize it when it is uploaded and block it from being uploaded.. not every time the file is downloaded.
No one else gets hurt? Let's just imagine that you are in a moderate accident. Say another car's tire blows out. Their car loses control and crashes into yours, legally making the accident their fault. Your car rolls over an embankment and you are thrown out of the car and killed. Now the person has to live with causing an accident that killed you, when you would have been fine had you worn a seatbelt. Plus, do you really think that first responders enjoy scraping your dead ass off the highway or that other motorists want to see your internal organs spread out all over the road, all because you weren't quite comfortable enough with a seat belt on. No, it definitely does hurt other people.
Finding other idiots on
Excuse the fuck out of me, but when the vehicle you are travelling in hits a solid object (like another vehicle) then most of your momentum remains until *you* manage to hit something solid. If you're a passenger in the back of a car, then that solid object is likely to be the person in the seat in front of you. If you're in the front and it's a side impact, then there's a 50% chance that you're going to slam into the driver at most of the speed your vehicle was travelling at. The results are never pretty.
It's bloody minded ignorance like this that makes the roads a more dangerous place. I don't mean this unkindly, but I just hope you get a harmless scare that is bad enough, or see an accident victim cut up bad enough to make you wear your belt. You sure as hell aren't going to listen to reason.
When the posters fear their moderators, there is tyranny; when the moderators fears the posters, there is liberty.
OK, the seat belt analogy was bad, but this argument for requiring seat belt use takes the cake. To prevent others from seeing your mangled remains!?! I guess I can finally ask for my pet law: Mandatory stomach stapling for the morbidly obese and pants-belt legislation for kids whose underwear sticks out above their trousers. Cause I don't enjoy those, and I'm forced to see them.
I am not a crackpot.
Finally! A slashdotter who understands U.S. copyright laws.
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
Depending on specifics of the algorithm, it may be very hard to defeat it if you still want the music to be recognizable by the listeners. I am familiar with the audio fingerprinting algorithm from another company. The false positives are not a problem. The hash space is huge thus collisions are very rare. The false negatives can be a problem, but if they can weed out even 95% of attempts to upload copyrighted music, their life is going to be much, much easier. And if you distort the music enough to defeat the fingerprinting, then maybe you just have created a new masterpiece (c) you :-).