go fish
Sites like YouTube and MySpace can run themselves ragged manually pulling copyrighted content from their services. But in the future, for legal and practical reasons, the process will have to be automated. In this week’s Plain Text, I write about acoustic fingerprinting, and companies like SnoCap and Audible Magic. The firms administer databases of copyrighted songs and then scan the online services for matches - a sprawling high tech version of the familiar card game Go Fish.