Yesterday we already reported about the new beta 10 of napster including the acoustic fingerprint system. We said they put a watermark on your files, so you must either make your files read-only or share them from CD. Well sorry about this but I think this doens't work! Read on the napster Q&A:
 Q: What is an acoustic fingerprint?A: An acoustic fingerprint is a small amount of data that represents the unique sound recording of a file. Using complex matching algorithms and acoustic fingerprints, different versions of a single recording can be identified as the same recording. |
Q: Why are you collecting acoustic fingerprints?
A: We are collecting acoustic fingerprints to help us build a system that more accurately identifies the music files that our users are sharing.
So they take a sample from your music file, compare this with copyrighted material and boom! file not shared anymore because it's illegal. So the new software includes technology that can identify songs by sound and not just by their names! I must say it's an impressive technology
Anyway although they encourage users to download the latest version of Napster, users with previous versions will still be able to use the program.
Source: Napster Q&A
