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 soon before this is widely defeated?

Add a little noise here, stretch and squeeze some sounds there, change some frequencies over in that corner, and pretty soon you'll either have false-negatives or the potential of false-positives.

If it defeats the filters expect such tools to become widely used within a few months.

Re:How soon before this is widely defeated?

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.

Watch how many bands get mad and leave

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've been waiting for this moment

Now I can definitely pat myself on the back for not having a myspace account. Another freedom of ours eroded away - the ability to infringe copyright, ignoring the consequences. 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.

Silver lining...

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.

spelling error

review all uploads and prevent 'inappropriate' material from ever seeing the light of day.

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

That'll take care of audio...

...asuming it works as claimed. Myspace is chock-full of copyright violations of still pictures and videos and the typical Myspace user seems to not have a clue.

Don't worry about fair use

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

Gracenote's own article on this:

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

The evaders will win

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.

YES!

Sweet! I'd better make some noise music quick, I'll have the rights on white noise on MySpace in no time!

It's good.

It's good. Good idea. Should cut out much of the copyrighted content posted on MySpace.

Oh wait, this is /. What about false positives? How can they be accurate? Why do the RIAA think the world revolves around them (at the inconvenience of others)?

Sounds like...

... a death sentence to the Weird Al's MySpace page to me.

Am I the only one...

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...)

Wasting their time

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.

lmao, myspace can't get simple stuff right!

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.".

not necessarily automated.

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 fingerprinting is not a binary process: "is a known track / is not a known track". Many implementations return a "confidence" value, or even the top 3 "best guesses". Thus, it could automate the process for, say, hits where the system is 98% sure that it's a copyright violation or above, but notify a human for hits that are between 80% and 98%.

I really don't see a problem with utilizing statistical techniques to determine whether or not a song is likely copied off of a CD. There's nothing unethical about identifying music. I'm really surprised at the number of negative posts here...

Reminds me of the Titanic

Glug, glug, glug, glug, glug...

Oh No!!!!!

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!

I'm glad they're working on this important feature

...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-girlfriend to file a restraining order.

It's a terrible mess, and Myspace is dragging their feet. Average age of each new profile created by the stalker: weeks to months, even though they're contacted promptly by email each time. Amount of uniquely identifying information provided about the stalker to police by Myspace: zero.

This is the kind of situation you would expect a very large, very public Web site to have some defined policy for. As far as I can tell my friend has not been able to find this policy. (Or to find a working phone number for these folks.)

But instead of worrying about little details like freakish Internet stalkers who pose a significant danger of actually hurting someone, they're working on bottom-line things like "not getting sued by recording industry".

Color me surprised?

(Poor "my friend", though. At least all I have to worry about is problem sets.)

Only possible advantage

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.

Macwold?

Found it strange that macworld reported this story?

Not much music then

Apart from a few dusty 78rpm shellacs, pretty much all music recordings are copyrighted, so MySpace is going to find itself pretty barren.

DMCA "safe harbor" provisions

Under the terms of the DMCA, ISPs cannot be held liable for copyright infringments by their users if they follow certain procedures, particularly the "take-down" procedures whereby a copyright holder can request the removal of allegedly infringing material.

This provision applied a "common-carrier-like" regime to ISPs, treating them as conduits rather than as publishers or editors. Once you start reviewing uploads for potential infringment, doesn't this undermine the conduit model and open the ISP to potential claims of contributory infringement? Once ISPs begin reviewing content, they become editors and not simply conduits. I would think this is a dangerous road for an ISP to tred.

HAAAHAHAHAHAHAHA

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

It's amazing

We have officially invested more brainpower, money and technology into correcting and restricting technology compared to simply using it to its own best expression.

Why can't someone somewhere do something like this for identity theft? Oh yeah I forgot, because WE'RE ALL FUCKING SHEEP BEING LEAD AROUND BY CORPORATE ATTORNEYS !!!

My bad.

How does it work?

I've wondered about this, ever since buying a Neuros mp3/ogg player, which theoretically could identify for you which song from the radio you were recording.

It seems like the most naive approaches would be far too brittle: a bit-by-bit comparison or an MD5 sum, for example, would be thrown off by just eliminating or adding one audio sample in the song.

Even something like spectral analysis would be subject to errors: unless the reference copy they kept of a spectral analysis was produced using exactly the same start- and end- sample in the recording, as was used when checking a newly submitted recording, even the spectra might mismatch.

So how do they do it without getting a ton of false positives and/or false negatives? (Or do they not even manage to avoid those errors?)

Doesn't matter while music player is broken

Until they fix their media player this doesn't really matter - you can't play any track that's been added in the last six months or so where the uploader hasn't marked it as available for download. So about 80% of all tunes on various MySpace artists' pages are now completely unlistenable anyway.

This is NOT to stop copyrighted material appearing

It's plausible deniability for Myspace/Newscorp - so they can tell all the other media companies they're doing their best to remove infringing material.

It doesn't have to actually work. In fact it's better for MyCorp if it doesn't work, because then they get to keep using all the copyrigthed stuff that attracts so many users to their site.

Musicbrainz?

God I hope they aren't using Musicbrainz.... they'll rape their bandwidth, and then they'll not give any money back to that project. The new audio fingerprinting is so accurate there it's not funny.

sampling

what of the folks who sample songs for their own use... wouldn't this always come up as copyrighted?

legit vs illegal files

MacWorld reports that MySpace is going to start implementing audio fingerprinting to prevent copyrighted material from appearing on their site.

Weird Al had recently posted for free download a couple of his songs from his new album. Ironic that one of those free downloads was his song "Don't Download This Song". But those are HIS songs, and I assume that by posting them he had made sure with his producers and whatnot that they agreed to it as well. Will MySpace now prevent Weird Al from posting his own songs of his and his producers' own free will, because they also happened to be available for purchase on CD at your local music store? Will there be a way for people to legitimately post their own copyrighted works, or are legit artists now going to have to find a different site to post their own works that they wish to post?

MySpace doesn't allow uploads

Does MySpace actaully permit users to upload MP3s to their servers? I've seen dozens of MySpace users upload their MP3s to our webserver and then MySpace leeches the bandwidth from us instead of MySpace servers. Am I seeing this wrong or are the users loading their MP3s to our servers to avoid MySpace TOS problems? I am not a MySpace user.

I wonder...

...how good this fingerprinting is - will it detect the Beastie Boys / Dan the Automator mashup I've posted on my own Myspace page, which is two copyrighted tracks combined?

From "About Gracenote"

Current:

"Gracenote provides businesses with critical embedded software and metadata that ENABLE consumers to better MANAGE, ENJOY, and DISCOVER digital media."

Updated:

"Gracenote provides businesses with critical embedded software and metadata that PREVENT consumers from MANAGING, ENJOYING, and DISCOVERING digital media."

A whole new industry

MySpace has created whole industries around it and this will be another. People will setup sites using Adsense as a revenue source. The sites will input a sound clip and output the same clip in a way that will bypass the audio fingerprinting.

Doesn't prevent "copyright material"

MacWorld reports that MySpace is going to start implementing audio fingerprinting to prevent copyrighted material from appearing on their site.

Which is clearly not true; anything subject to copyright is copyrighted simply by the act of creation, so unless "audio fingerprinting" can somehow identify that a work is a original creative work legally subject to copyright, it won't "prevent copyrighted material from appearing" anywhere. Even the slightly more detailed Gracenote press release [gracenote.com] (or perhaps the MySpace policy is referred to) seems confused about this.

It will prevent material which (according the matching algorithm used), "matches" material that is found in the "Gracenote Global Media Database". It supposedly will block "unauthorized copyrighted material", though the article isn't clear about any method to verify that the use is "unauthorized".

Simple solution...

Stop using myspace.

So wait...

Myspace can't stop the barrage of stalkers and child predators, but they will be able to find and remove copyrighted files? Sounds like Murdoch's priorities need a bit of realignment.

Fill the Database with Every Sound in the Universe

Send them so much chaff to Fingerpint that no one can upload any audio whatsoever. At that point the site, hell maybe all such sites, will be worthless. Let's make the whole fucking Internet deaf and blind. Maybe then the greedy bastards will get the point.

Apparently, the *AA think information wants to be useless. So, let's give them more useless information than they can handle.

Re:SHA256

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

Re:Just like real finger printing today...

Or has GOOGLE crossed the evil line?

Hmmm... Google? Did I miss something?

Re:Just like real finger printing today...

But... we're talking about MySpace, not YouTube?

I think this is where the confusion comes in...

Re:Just like real finger printing today...

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.

Re:Just like real finger printing today...

Funny, I never realized that about those two songs.

But beyond that example, all music is derivative. There are a number of chord progressions that lots of music uses. Standard blues riffs are the basis of countless songs. I highly doubt that at this time there's a way for software to accurately recognize songs. Similar songs? Sure, but there's no law against creating music that sounds similar to other music. The false positives will make it difficult to upload damn near anything.

Others have already commented on the Google thing, I'll just chalk it up to being early in the morning.

Re:Just like real finger printing today...

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?

Re:Just like real finger printing today...

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:Just like real finger printing today...

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.

Rupert Murdoch (FoxNews, Sky, etc.) owns MySpace

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

Re:Just like real finger printing today...

I can name that DRM in 3 notes, Jim.

Re:"Speak Softly..."

...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.