[carbonica]

> However, the ruling makes clear that if MP3tunes scanned a customer’s music collection and found “Stairway to Heaven” ripped from a CD with a slightly different file size, the company could not simply substitute a master copy. Instead, that customer would have to upload the file.

> While the latter case still seems non-sensical, the ruling still must come as a relief to Google, Amazon and Dropbox.

Come on, how is that non-sensical? It'd be dead simple to set the ID3 tags of any 4MB mp3 file to match the tags accepted for a given song. From what I read, and the legalspeak got pretty heavy so I may have missed it, there wasn't any discussion of audio fingerprinting or more advanced ways to determine two files are the same song.

Want an entire artist's discography? Use a 15KB app which spits out 100 junk MP3 files with the right ID3 tags and submit them to MP3Tunes. If we do what this author considers "sensical," you should get the real music back.

[meow]

The article was mentioning md5 hashes of songs to find the matches. Besides, its not a question of whether the system can be foolproof.

[carbonica]

But what I pulled out from the Wired article amounted to "it's silly that if the file sizes are slightly different you need to upload your whole song." If file sizes are different, the MD5 will be wrong in nearly all cases. They're talking about something different in that paragraph than you are.