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American Morning
Napster Software Down Before Shift to Subscription Service
Aired July 05, 2001 - 09:35 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
BRIAN NELSON, CNN ANCHOR: If you're trying to download a song from the Internet this week, don't count on using Napster to do it. The popular song-sharing software is down now while the company tweaks the software. By the end of the summer, Napster says it's going to shift from a free service to a subscription service, which includes some new fingerprinting technology.
CNN's science correspondent Ann Kellan is here to tell us more -- Ann.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
SEAN WARD, RELATABLE, INC.: Well, I got my first computer when I was eight.
ANN KELLAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (on camera): Eight?
(voice-over): 20-year-old Sean Ward of Alexandria, Virginia, has developed a unique way to identify music. It's not as dramatic as this, but in about a second his software can give a song like Metallica's "Unforgiven " a unique digital fingerprint.
WARD: This is what a fingerprint actually looks like. It's made up of hundreds of different numbers which describe different aspects of a piece of music or sound.
KELLAN: For example a live performance of Madonna's song "Vogue" and a studio version of the same song will produce two separate and unique prints. And you don't need to play the whole song to create a fingerprint.
WARD: It's very fast.
KELLAN: Napster purchased Ward's fingerprint software to help satisfy a court order and make its free music-sharing software charge people to download certain copyrighted songs.
The fingerprint identifies the song without using its name or title, so efforts to fool the system by changing or misspelling the name or title won't work. For example, this should be Metallica's "Unforgiven." But Ward says the system is not bullet-proof. The music is still vulnerable to theft.
WARD: You can still copy that music to a CD or whatnot. This isn't putting restrictions on music. All this is doing is simply identifying it.
KELLAN: Ward developed the fingerprint system not to blow the whistle on music thieves but to recommend music. His software builds a profile of the songs you like, then recommends songs with similar fingerprints that you may never have heard of before.
Ward says he's been accused of helping kill free music on the Internet. He disagrees.
WARD: I would say it's more about trying to let the party go on in a way that everybody can participate how they want.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
KELLAN: As for now, Napster's not saying when it will be back online, but it says it's working quickly and should be online even before the subscription service would kick in.
And if you go to their Web site, you can see that they say that they're having upgrades to the database to support their new identification technology. And then say why is this happening, why it being suspended? And they're trying to clean up the database before resuming file transfers. Then they say please note the problem was with the database, not with the file identification technology, which means the fingerprinting system is working. But whether it's compatible with everything else is now, probably, the big stumbling block.
NELSON: For those of us who don't download music from the Internet, how does this system work currently? What's going to be the change once this new fingerprinting technology is installed.
KELLAN: Basically, when you are downloading from Napster, what you do is you type in the music request that you want, and your computer, when you have downloaded Napster, will go to other people's computers and find the song, and then you get the song. But in the future what it's going to do is it's going to take your request to a database filled with these fingerprinted song -- one, to make sure that the song that you're requesting has a matching fingerprint, and two, to make sure you're allowed to download that song.
NELSON: With the fingerprint, you can't share it, or is it traceable?
KELLAN: It's still being held on other people's -- Napster is music-sharing and still there, and you can share it. It's just comparing and making sure that the song you're requesting is one, isn't misspelled, and is allowed to be downloaded.
NELSON: CNN's Ann Kellan, thanks very much.
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