Audible Magic develops tools to identify copyrighted music material, based on a "fingerprint" information that is unique per each and every song. According to Audible Magic their technology is able track songs distributed online and possible could be used for blocking illegal audio distribution. The source indicates that Audible Magic is about to close a deal with Universal, so that Universal Music will deliver the fingerprints of each title released directly to Audible Magic.
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.
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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."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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