Audible Magic is one of several companies with so-called fingerprinting technology, which -- in this sense of that overloaded term -- means the ability to determine the identity of a content item simply by examining the bits.  In addition to its fingerprinting technology, Audible Magic maintains a database of music fingerprints, which currently numbers 3.5 million entries.

The company leverages its fingerprinting technology and database in various solutions.  One of these is CopySense, a server component that sits on a network, monitors it for P2P traffic, and takes whatever action a network administrator configures it to take, such as blocking the content.  Another solution is RepliCheck, which provides a similar function for CD manufacturing plants to help them ensure that they are not unwittingly duplicating copyrighted material without authorization.

Sony will register its content in the fingerprint database for use in both solutions.  Sony is also working with Audible Magic to make its fingerprinting technology part of Sony's internal content management systems, in order to help rationalize the identities of material in Sony's many different content repositories worldwide.

A fingerprint is, in this case, a way of determining a content item's identity while it is out in the world -- as opposed to a watermark, which can be used to insert a detectable identifier into content, but which the content's owner must proactively insert before distributing it anywhere.

Watermarks, by definition, have 100% chances of getting the identities of content items right, while fingerprints are essentially educated guesses that could be inaccurate.  Will fingerprinting technology identify a song whose profane language has been "dropped out" as being different from the unexpurgated version?  Will it differentiate between studio and live versions of a given track?  The full-length track versus the single for radio with the missing verse or early fade-out?  What about different performances of works from the standard classical repertoire?  One imagines that the answers to these questions had to be "yes" before Sony would sign a deal. 

Audible Magic also operates so-called broadcast monitoring systems, which automatically identify tracks played on radio stations.  Its first customer for broadcast monitoring has been CMJ Network, which publishes music charts for college and independent radio markets. 

CMJ is a natural to work with fingerprint-based -- as opposed to watermark-based -- broadcast monitoring, for several reasons.  First, much of the music that CMJ charts is on small, independent labels that cannot or will not do watermark insertion.  Second, even if fingerprint-based monitoring were only 95 percent accurate, that accuracy would far exceed CMJ's current method of relying on its traditional system of gathering reports from college stations that are often unreliable.  Finally, reporting of real airplay statistics will lead to real royalty payments to the artists -- as opposed to the current system of small statistical samples, which all but guarantees that non-mainstream artists get lost in the statistical noise.  Sony will contribute fingerprints of its material to the broadcast monitoring system that CMJ uses; SESAC already uses the system to generate royalty payments for its music publishers.

One disadvantage of fingerprinting is that it forces a record company (or collecting society, or other participant in music commerce) into a particular identification scheme that may or may not meet their needs, whereas watermarking can be used to support any type of identifier.  Yet the comparative ease of using fingerprinting is so overwhelming that its use is likely to become widespread to support various aspects of music commerce, not just piracy prevention.  This must be rationalized with various current efforts to create standard identifiers for music, such as GRid and Mi3p. 

As for the use of fingerprinting technology with P2P networks, it is extremely unlikely -- barring a court order -- that the existing major P2P networks will adopt any such technology as a means of blacklisting or collecting payment for use of copyrighted material.  Any P2P network that does this will have to be a new one whose users expect this behavior. (One such network is UK-based Wippit, which uses fingerprinting technology from Gracenote, one of Audible Magic's competitors.) 

Otherwise, technology like Audible Magic's CopySense must be used voluntarily by network administrators, such as those on college campuses.  In that setting, fingerprinting technology can peacefully coexist with the kinds of copyright-respecting music services that Napster and MusicNet have been offering.

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