4shared.com - free file sharing and storage - Music identification service

Music identification service for copyright holders

Recently, 4shared has introduced another line of defense against possible copyright infringements which is aimed to help music owners to protect their copyrights. Our service is intended for safe and legal use. We respect the intellectual property and care about protecting it. The new automated measure is the audio identification service, which helps to figure out whether an audio file is copyrighted or not. It is based on Echoprint – an open source music identification system.

Echoprint uses special algorithm to calculate a digital "fingerprint" of a music file, based on audio features of the file. It allows to precise the identification which does not depend on such file properties as size, name, compression rate, etc. It is powered by The Echo Nest – a spin-off of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The algorithm was presented at the International Conference on Music Information Retrieval 2011. Upon testing, it demonstrated very low error probabilities and high performance of functional characteristics. Testing shows that the bit error probability P(e) for Echoprint varies between 0.3% for a 60-second highquality audio file to 1.36% for a 60-second low-bit-rate mp3 file. You can find out more in the following document: http://ismir2011.ismir.net/latebreaking/LB-7.pdf. If you wish to take a closer look at Echoprint, please check http://echoprint.me/.

As for 4shared, Echoprint's algorithm is used to find the match between an audio file, provided by a copyright holder and music files shared via our service. If the "fingerprint" of a file matches any "fingerprint" in our database of copyrighted music then its sharing is denied.

4shared invites all interested music labels, authors and copyright holders to contact us in order to be able to protect your property. We will provide special accounts for uploading copyrighted music files into the database. Files uploaded to such accounts are completely isolated and cannot be accessed by any means to ensure the security of original materials.

To request an account, please contact us at rightholders@4shared.com. All the details will be provided in our reply to your inquiry.