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.Well, I couldn't be more sceptic about this technology. It seems to be full of potential inaccuracies, like the fact that psycho acoustic compressors (such as MP3, AAC, Vorbis, MusePack) strogly alter the sound signal for an example. It also seems that it would be al too easy to go around this "finger print tracking" by wrapping the audio files inside another file format.
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"What it does is accelerate the time to get music into our database," Ikezoye said. "That's when piracy is the biggest problem--right around the release date."
News.com
Written by: Lasse Penttinen @ 13 Aug 2003 13:10