'Audio Fingerprinting' - Already a failure?

[Psydd]

Source: msn.com.com/2100-1105-506...tag=netcal

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Digital song-tracking company Audible Magic is striking a deal with Universal Music Group for song information, getting another leg up in its quest to be able to identify--and potentially block--music as it is transferred online.


The new arrangement, expected to be announced Tuesday, will see Universal give Audible Magic a "fingerprint," or digital identification tool, for each song it releases, before albums are shipped to retailers. The company uses those fingerprints to identify copyrighted songs online or in other venues such as CD-manufacturing plants to help guard against unauthorized copying...

...The company has created a library of audio fingerprints that it said allows it to identify close to 3.7 million songs on the fly, essentially by comparing the audio characteristics of a digital music file to the files it has on record.

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The sad part about this is that either the labels or Audible Magic don't realize that you can change any sort of digital fingerprint on a song. You could add the slightest bit of reverb, and it wouldn't be aurally noticable, yet the whole 'fingerprint' would be thrown off. Circumvention could also occur if folks simply put something like an eighth of a second of silence or noise at the beggining of a song, once again throwing off the digital fingerprinting system.

I really need to come up with some stupid plan like this and sell it to the major labels for millions of dollars.

Nbrid!

[BoneStormer]

I doubt it's something as simple as a "checksum" so adding short silence probably won't get around the check. I'm not sure I understand what they hope to accomplish with this. Seems almost more of a legal thing to say 'hey this is a legal copy your buying' or a way to 'prove' you have an illegal copy.

The goal of most anti-piracy moves is to limit it. You'll never completly stop it. And I don't know what this does unless at some point they hope places like KaZaa incorporate it.

Get out, and take your Sacagawea dollars with you! I'll give you 'til three. One!

[nbrid]

If anything it will just make finding the big label songs a little bit harder. Luckily the more popular songs will be modified as Psydd says, by fans so that the song sounds exactly the same, but isn't identified by this procedure. As for the "indie" music, I doubt it will even be affected.

Then again, it's not really safe to download anything now that this mblast thing is going around.

[BoneStormer]

Well it seems Universal is finally doing something to help sales in a positive way. They usually charge retailers $12 each CD (with a MSRP of around $18), but now are dropping it to $10 per CD (MSRP ~$13)! Others will probably follow suit. I wonder if this will effect some places (like Best Buy) which already sells CDs at cost.

Thing is though they are stupid if they think this will have a drastic impact. A nice first step, yes. But they have to go much further. And I have no clue how their dreams of selling music online as their main avenue of distribution will EVER work since you can always just fire up Kazaa, WinMX, whatever and grab it for free...

Get out, and take your Sacagawea dollars with you! I'll give you 'til three. One!

[klamkilla]

Or people could stop complaining, and either buy CDs, or accept the fact that downloading stuff IS illegal and getting caught is a risk that they need to be willing to take.

[BoneStormer]

Yeah, and we all know that will happen...

That or people will still want everything for free and get pissed when someone tries to take that 'right' away by calling it 'illegal' or something.

Get out, and take your Sacagawea dollars with you! I'll give you 'til three. One!

[BoneStormer]

On a related note, it seems already one of the numerous lawsuits RIAA brought against filesharers recently has settled. Some 12 year old girl in NY who I guess was even pictured on the front of the NYPost was scared and quickly settled for $2,000 with her mothers help (and I'm sure encouragement...).

We'll see how this all turns out over the next several months, and see what kind of impact it has. Just pisses people off? Scares people into reducing file swapping? What? They also might have a hard time getting anyone else to settle until they win a big case, which itself won't be easy for them to do.

Get out, and take your Sacagawea dollars with you! I'll give you 'til three. One!

[torkworld]

Yeah and the little girl was from the projects and thought she had a right to download because she paid some fuckers $30 for a P2P program (cuz she didn't know they were free).

I'm not worried at this point because the RIAA right now is going after those who SHARE copyrighted songs and I don't share SHIT lmao.

..and no I'm NOT a "leech", the entire catalog of Torkworld records mp3s is available for sharing from my PC. And as I've said before, as long as shows like MTV cribs are on the air, I won't feel a bit of remorse!

Oh and didn't they do that fingerprinting shit right before Napster died along with blocking the searches? I remember slightly mispelling a word and getting my shit anyway or getting some files with a skip at the beginning

www.torkworld.cjb.net

[Psydd]

yeah, I snaked my way around the napster blcoks too. I remember the most common way I found to work was just switching letters around (Saftey Dance as Opposed to Safety Dance, or maybe just Safty Dance!)

[nbrid]

God bless austrailia and their wonderful neglect for piracy laws. Where would we be without you? I'll tell you where! A whole lot more warezless and without countless justin timberlake mp3's!