Ren on Acoustic Fingerprinting and the Future of P2P

My colleague Ren Bucholz has a great post about the recent injection of Audible Magic into the P2P debate. Audible Magic claims to have a technology for fingerprinting music files on P2P networks. The RIAA wants to use it to filter out infringing files, but Ren has a better idea -- use it to count the files as a way to pay artists:

The interesting, perhaps wonderful thing about acoustic fingerprinting is that it's robust enough to monitor today's networks but unable to sniff tomorrow's encrypted traffic. I say "wonderful" because it's a clear illustration of two paths. The first looks much like today, where Audible Magic-style solutions can interoperate with relatively open networks to determine fair compensation for artists. The second is a world where the arms race continues, market-based solutions become impossible and legal/technical/cultural antagonism takes over.