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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."
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...
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.