Classic Function Creep As EU Police May Gain Access To Asylum Seekers Fingerprint Database

As Techdirt readers well know, one of the problems with measures brought in for "exceptional situations" -- be it fighting terrorism or tackling child pornography -- is that once in place, they have a habit of being applied more generally. A case in point is the blocking of Newzbin2 by BT in the UK. That was possible because BT had already installed its "Cleanfeed" system to block child pornography: once in place, this "specialized" censorship system could easily be deployed to block quite different sites. 

On Techdirt.

Free Software Coder Bullied over *Algorithm*

As long-suffering readers of this blog will know, one of the many reasons I am against software patents is that software consists of algorithms, and algorithms are just maths, so a software patent is a patent on knowledge - the purest knowledge there is (a mathematician writes).

Sometimes defenders of software patents deny that software is just algorithms (don't ask me how, but some do). So I was particularly interested to read about this poor hacker being contacted over - you guessed it - algorithms, pure and simple:

Landmark Digital Services owns the patents that cover the algorithm used as the basis for your recently posted “Creating Shazam In Java”. While it is not Landmark’s intention to alienate those in the Open Source and Music Information Retrieval community, Landmark must request that you do not ship, deploy or post the code presented in your post. Landmark also requests that in the future you do not ship, deploy or post any portions or versions of this code in its current state or in any modified state.

As you can see, there is no way of disguising the fact that this claims to be a patent on an *algorithm* - that is, on maths, which is knowledge and therefore unpatentable.

But it gets worse. As the poor chap points out:

I've written some code (100% my own) and implemented my own methods for matching music. There are some key differences with the algorithm Shazam uses.

That is, he didn't copy the code, and it's not even the same approach.

But wait, there's more.

As he notes:

Why does Landmark Digital Services think they hold a patent for the concepts used in my code? Even if my code works pretty different from the Shazam code (from which the patents came).

What they describe in the patent is a system which:
1. Make a series of fingerprints of a media file and/or media sample
(such as audio, but could also be text, video, multimedia, etc)
2. Have a database/hashtable of fingerprints as lookup
3. Compare the set of hashtable hits using their moment in time it happened

This is very vague, basically the only innovative idea is matching the found fingerprints linearly in time. Because the first two steps describe how a hashtable works and creating a hash works. These concepts are not new nor innovative.

Moreover:

I've also had contact with other people who have implemented this kind of algorithms. Most notible is Dan Ellis. His implementation can be found here: http://labrosa.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/resources/matlab/fingerprint/

He hasn't been contacted (yet), but he isn't planning on taking his MatLab implementation down anyway and has agreed for me to place the link here. This raises another interesting question, why are they targetting me, somebody who hasn't even published the code yet, and not the already published implementation of Dan?!

And if they think its illegal to explain the algorithm, why aren't they going after this guy? http://laplacian.wordpress.com/2009/01/10/how-shazam-works/

This is where I got the idea to implement the algorithm and it is mentioned in my own first post about the Java Shazam.

So, moving to that last site, we find a detailed analysis of the algorithm - which is all pretty obvious. How did he do that?

So I was curious how it worked, and luckily there is a paper [.pdf] written by one of the developers explaining just that. Of course they leave out some of the details, but the basic idea is exactly what you would expect: it relies on fingerprinting music based on the spectrogram.

In other words, the description of the algorithm by the company's programmers shows that it "is exactly what you would expect".

At every level, then, this is an obvious, algorithmic, mathematical approach. And yet someone in Holland - a country that doesn't recognise software patents at all - finds himself under pressure in this manner for some code he wrote independently implementing that general, algorithmic mathematical idea.

Now explain to me how patents promote innovation, please...

Update: Re-reading the post I realise that things are even more ridiculous. Here's what the company wants:

we would like you to refrain from releasing the code at all and to remove the blogpost explaining the algorithm.

Now, you recall that the algorithm is the thing that the company claims to have a patent on. The original idea behind a patent was that in return for its grant, the inventor would *reveal* all the details of his or her invention so that others could use it once the patent had expired, as a quid pro quo. So if the company claims a patent on its invention, it must *by definition* reveal the algorithm.

Against that background, this demand to remove an explanation of the algorithm is simply absurd, and contradicts the very nature of a patent - it's like asking the USPTO not to reveal the patents it grants.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

Lords, Bless 'Em

More sanity from the House of Lords:

The government has been defeated in the House of Lords over the issue of keeping peoples' DNA and fingerprints on the police national database.

Peers backed a Conservative amendment calling for national guidelines for deleting material by 161 votes to 150.

Ministers said the safeguard was not needed and could hinder anti-terror operations but critics said innocent people should not be stigmatised.

The safeguard was not needed, presumably, because we no longer have any right to be regarded as innocent until proven guilty - the government's operating principle being that we are *all* potential terrorists, and therefore should *all* be under surveillance at all times and in all ways.

Mapping the Power of People

Leaving aside Terminal 5's little teething problems today, and independently of the fact that the only way they will get my fingerprints is if they cut my fingers off, here's a heart-warming tale of how the people beat The Man/Men when it comes to providing up-to-the-minute maps:

Heathrow’s terminal 5 is a major high profile new development. On it’s own it is bigger than any other airport in Europe except Frankfurt. It will generate, from today, more car journeys than a decent sized town. Yet most of the on-line mapping sites don’t seem to be capable of having a decent map ready on the day that it opens.

It’s examples like this that demonstrate how well OpenStreetMap can produce accurate and timely maps. Further vindication of the effectiveness of the OpenStreetMap approach.

(Via James Tyrrell.)

Thanks, Tony - But No Thanks

I received an email from Tony Blair yesterday. Not that this was so special, since he also sent it to the other 28,000 people who had signed an e-petition calling for ID cards to be scrapped. You can read the missive here (and if you're feeling really left out, you can copy it into an email to yourself and pretend that it came from our Tone).

What's particularly galling is that this email essentially says "thanks for your request, but get lost", and then goes on to repeat all the tired old misinformation about the ID card scheme's cost, its efficacy against terrorism and how it will reduce identity theft. Although I could pick some of its arguments apart, I'd rather leave it to the master himself, The Reg's John Lettice:

The National Identity Register will allow police to add the entire adult population of the UK to their suspect list, giving them the opportunity to check fingerprints left at scenes of crime against those collected from ID card and passport applicants, says Tony Blair. Nor are fingerprints in other EU countries necessarily safe - the introduction of biometric technology, he adds, will "improve the flow of information between countries on the identity of offenders.

Blair made the pledge to collar the lot of us, and some, as part of a rag-bag of warmed-over, half-baked, misleading, and just plain untrue claims issued in an email to the near-28,000 signatories of the Downing Street petition calling for the scrapping of the ID card scheme.

The Open Body, Biometric Spoofing and ID Cards

Our bodies are open. That is, unless we are planning some criminal activity, we do not try to hide the basic physical facts about ourselves - our voice, our face, our eyes, our fingerprints. Unfortunately, these are precisely the characteristics that biometric ID schemes depend on for verification. This is tantamount to walking around with a large sign saying "my password is xxxx".

And this isn't just my opinion. Here's what one Bori Toth, biometric research and advisory lead at Deloitte & Touche, no less, has to say on the subject:

Many people are trying to regard biometrics as secret but they aren't. Our faces and irises are visible and our voices are being recorded. Fingerprints and DNA are left everywhere we go and it's been proved that these are real threats.

So the use of precisely these spoofable biometrics is just one more reason to bin the whole idiotic ID card idea, which rather depends on them being foolproof. (Via Slashdot.)