Napster has launched a new version of its music-swapping service that marks its first step toward blocking music based on the contents of a file and lays the groundwork for a new subscription service.
Released on Sunday, Napster’s beta version 10 of the software for its music-download service introduces new technology to build a database of music based on acoustic fingerprints, the data that represent the unique sound recording of a file. That database is the first step toward blocking music based on fingerprints. A filter must have a database to check in order to decide whether a specific work should be blocked.
