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MySpace to Use Audio Fingerprinting

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Tue Oct 31, 2006 06:39 AM
from the your-server-is-listening dept.
Media Music The Internet
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."
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  • when their songs are (wrongly either because it's their original song and it's copyrighted by them or because of a technical glitch) forbidden from being uploaded.
  • I takes forever for a video feed to start with a 6Mb/s downstream. WHat going to happen when they start analyzing that data on there end also?

    Here's to hoping MySpace bloats their site out of existence.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by joshetc (955226)
      Its ok because they analize it when it is uploaded and block it from being uploaded.. not every time the file is downloaded.

  • I am absolutely certain that this audio-fingerprinting software is aware of the concept of fair use and has embedded logic to handle cases where fair use is employed.

    Ok. I'm having troubles writing that without losing my face.

  • Gracenote's own article on this (Score:4, Informative)

    by in2mind (988476) on Tuesday October 31 2006, @07:12AM (#16655831) Homepage
    Gracenote's own article on this:

    http://www.gracenote.com/music/corporate/press/art icle.html/date=2006103000 [gracenote.com]

  • The evaders will win (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Paul Lamere (21149) on Tuesday October 31 2006, @07:15AM (#16655851) Homepage Journal
    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.
    • One way around that would be to increase the tolerance to distortion until the filter matches everything from white noise to Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.

      They'd have to add a whitelisting mechanism to allow legitimate music through, but I don't suppose News International will see a problem with tighter control what content they allow on MySpace. All in the interests of protecting their users, obviously.

    • I'd agree with you if, for some strange reason, MySpace were the best way of trading music online. Even as things stand now, it is far from that. Once the fingerprint censors step in, the reaction I expect is: "Oh, fine, we'll just trade music in some other way" - and that will be the end of it. So I think this is a smart move by NewsCorp (parent of MySpace).

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by (H)elix1 (231155)
      I wonder how well this will actually work.

      The technology works surprisingly well on a cell phone. One of the guys I work with in the UK showed me Shazam. I picked a random track from his vast MP3 collection, he dialed a number and held out his phone for a half a minute, and shortly thereafter they SMS'ed him the artist. Not a quite background either...

      http://www.shazam.com/music/portal/sp/s/media-type /html/user/anon/page/default/template/what_is_tagg ing/music.html [shazam.com]

      Take that same technology and do it on
      • When somebody wraps it in a neat little bow, makes it available for download, and maintains it through the escalation of the arms race, sure. See also Peerguardian, keygens, DVD ripping, etc.
  • ... a death sentence to the Weird Al's MySpace page to me.
  • That thinks this is a GREAT development? No more music playing when I visit someone else's page...finally! Why people think they must play a song when I visit their page is beyond me. It was popular back in '95 or so, when the web first became popular, but then common sense broke out and everyone stopped doing it...until MySpace came along. (And don't get me started on the awful designs people use - backgrounds that make the text impossible to read and slow to scroll, etc...)
  • What's to stop someone from simply (drum roll):

    posting an off-site link to illegal content

    ripping and saving under a different file type

    stop using MySpace and moving on to the next big hype It's their money let em waste it how they want. They should know by now its only a matter of time before whatever solution they use will be defeated.

  • Is there any chance at all this will work? Myspace can't even handle basic uptime issues, let alone complex audio fingerprinting technology. I'm not even 100% sure they have a test environment yet (for many years they didn't). Half the time you go to the site at least one part of it is completely broken. Will we start getting messages from Tom, "sorry guys, every song thinks that it's hey ya. We'll fix it. In the meantime don't email us. We know.".
  • The story says:

    MySpace will review all music audio recordings uploaded by community members to their profiles, identifies that which is copyrighted, and blocks the uploading of such music as appropriate.

    It says NOTHING about how this will be implemented. For all we know, they are not cutting the human out of this process. It's very, very possible that they'll be using fingerprinting to flag potential copyright violations, and have a human review it before deciding to reject an upload.

    Besides this, audio fin

  • Millions of 13-year-olds will no longer be able to spread plastic, manufactured "build-a-songs" puked from the mouths of talentless indivduals elevated to stardom by millions of brainless Pop Idol fans...

    I'll never be able to sleep soundly again!

  • ...and not on, say, responding to emails from my friend. He's being stalked on the Internet by a ruthless AOL-using lunatic who has conjured death threats against his ex-girlfriend while faking his identity, using publicly available information from Yahoo & Facebook & a personal blog. Whoever this is has convinced the police in three different states that my friend is writing these death threats (and thereby gotten him questioned and an investigation ongoing) and has convinced my friend's ex-girlfri
  • Maybe it could block a few of the jackass wanabee videos by mistaking pain screams for Celine Dion.

    Not that I care anyway. When they are trying to remove themself from the gene pool, at least, they're not playing M-rated videogames.
  • Apart from a few dusty 78rpm shellacs, pretty much all music recordings are copyrighted, so MySpace is going to find itself pretty barren.

  • We can only hope that myspace puts as much effort into this feature as they did into all the other great and well-designed features on their site. BWAAAAHAHAHAHAHA

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by tibike77 (611880)
      Ah, yes, because every MP3 file playing a certain specific song is identical in length/checksum ... [/sarcasm]

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Zaatxe (939368)
      It's kind of like the seat belt thing. I don't have to wear it (if I'm stupid enough) but no one else gets hurts in the process.

      It's in moments like this I wish there was a "-1 Bad Analogy" mod point.
      • Well, depends... if in his country (I suppose the USA) they don't HAVE to wear the seatbelt, it would be a good analogy.
        Quite frankly I hate having to wear it myself, but it's the law here, so... no choice.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Psiren (6145)
          Quite frankly I hate having to wear it myself, but it's the law here, so... no choice.


          So, if it wasn't the law, you'd choose not to wear it? I can't even begin to imagine why you'd not want to. There is absolutely no way on earth I would drive or be a passenger in a car without wearing a seatbelt.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by IDontAgreeWithYou (829067)
      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

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Rob the Bold (788862)

        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.

        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 stapli

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by stunt_penguin (906223)
      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.
      • Fine. Re-phrased: there are laws in several countries against not wearing a seat belt. For those they apply to, such laws invalidate the GP's on-topic analogy. This is rather obvious, so I wish I didn't have to spell it out, but apparently someone didn't get it...
      • In the USA it's based on the State. Most states require a seat-belt other states do not. I live in New Hampshire and beyond a certain age (I think it's 16 or 18 now) you don't have to wear a seat-belt if you don't want to. Similarly motorcycle helmets are optional.

        It's really quite comical, we get a lot of vacation traffic on the weekends from Massachusetts, it's not uncommon to see bikers cross the state line pull off to the side of the highway and take their helmets off. I wouldn't be surprised if the

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by tibike77 (611880)
      How about the "fair use" dispute ?
      You know, as in parody, for instance, to name but just ONE of the legitimate "false positives".

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by kjart (941720)

        How about the "fair use" dispute ?
        You know, as in parody, for instance, to name but just ONE of the legitimate "false positives".

        What does fair use have to do with anything? This is MySpace filtering what can and cannot be uploaded to their (free) service. Nobody is getting charged with anything here - they just can't upload their sweet, sweet Britney Spears music to MySpace (or whatever the kids are listening to nowadays).

    • Re:How soon before this is widely defeated? (Score:5, Funny)

      by tehwebguy (860335) on Tuesday October 31 2006, @07:13AM (#16655837) Homepage
      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.
      • 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.
        Note from Big Five: For increased diversity, and your listening pleasure, Sony has teamed up with BMG, so from now on, you may refer to us by Big Four. Thank you.

    • 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 [sloud.com] 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

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Zaatxe (939368)
      Or has GOOGLE crossed the evil line?

      Hmmm... Google? Did I miss something?

    • Re:Just like real finger printing today... (Score:4, Informative)

      by arun_s (877518) on Tuesday October 31 2006, @07:03AM (#16655787) Homepage Journal
      The 'article' is woefully low on information, apart from a mention of Gracenote MusicID being used. From Gracenote's own page [gracenote.com] (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.
      • is http://musicbrainz.org/ [musicbrainz.org]. It's an open source music fingerprinting project that can, for example, take a hard disk full of untagged MP3s, and tag them all up fairly accurately. It's free, and it works. I *think* it uses the same engine as the UK Shazam! mobile phone service where you could ring a premium rate phone number in a club, hold your mobile up near the speaker for 15 seconds, and it'd text you back the track/artist details seconds later.
        Presumably it'd be trivial for Myspace to run this in t
        • 15secs us not enought to tell the difference.

          Look songs like "Cheokee People" and Tim McGraw's "I am Cheokee", there are other examples of riffs that are the same for more than 15secs. But then these are stil commerical songs (all songs are copywritten).

          Now take a sound track that is open to copy, say Bethoven (he been dead along time). Have 15sec riff in a song that is his but is also in another currently commerical copywritten source. Does it pass or fail?

          What happens if the beat been sped up or slowed

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kjart (941720)

      Will there be a court to deside when it is wrong?

      You do realize that this is MySpace trying to police what is uploaded to their (free) service? I imagine there will also be mechanisms in place to have things that get through removed. So what would courts have to do with this?

      • The funny thing about the Google/MySpace confusion is that I noticed recently that some of Google's services will now integrate with MySpace (and will flat out mention MySpace, as in post to blog/MySpace buttons). And then there's that Google being the search provider for MySpace.

        I really wouldn't be surprised if one day Google takes over the day to day running of MySpace as a service provider for Fox/News International.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Tim C (15259)
      Will there be a court to deside when it is wrong?

      Why would there be? We're not talking about prosecuting people (yet...), just about filtering copyright materials that legally people shouldn't be uploading anyway.

      Why would a court be involved?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Kijori (897770)
        I think his point was that since it took a court to decide whether the two songs were legally different, will such a recourse be available in the even of something similiar happening - the MySpace audio fingerprint detecting a new composition as copyrighted, for example. I suspect there won't be.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Jekler (626699)

      One of the classic signs of getting old is when you can't tell the difference among the things kids are into these days (MySpace, YouTube, you know, one of those social thingies; Iron Maiden, Megadeath, whatever, one of those noisy bands).

      I'm not knocking you, I don't care to make such distinctions myself, but it's still funny to witness.

    • Sorry, Murdoch's NewsCorp never had a "don't be evil" policy!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Tim C (15259)
      The author of TFA appears to have misspelled "obstruct people posting legitimate content in myriad frustrating, confusing and probably threatening ways".

      So you've used it then? Or are you just using wild, unfounded speculation to spread FUD?

    • Re:"Speak Softly..." (Score:4, Funny)

      by trongey (21550) on Tuesday October 31 2006, @09:46AM (#16657369) Homepage
      ...Is a public broadcast of music from a CD I bought now illegal? I guess I'd better not EVER let anyone listen to a song off my iPod anymore -- they didn't buy the CD so unless they're lucky enough to hear the song on the radio between the 45 minutes of advertisments per hour they're just simply S.O.L.

      Finally! A slashdotter who understands U.S. copyright laws.

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