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foobarrio

Yes. Shazam has a bunch of patents and has sued people before:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shazam_(service)#Patent_infrin...

The core algorithm is well known and fun to implement:

https://www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/papers/Wang03-shazam.pdf

A blog had a simple implementation of it and were contacted by Shazam's lawyers:

http://royvanrijn.com/blog/2010/07/patent-infringement/

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Dolby and Philips also have a bunch of patents. It seems like basically any version of audio fingerprinting has been patented. So unless you can come up with a fundamentally different algorithm, you're going to get sued.

Thanks for the links. I know in the US patenting an algorithm is legal but this is not the case in Europe where patenting any software is not legal. If this was the case I wonder why streaming services based in Europe such as Spotify or Soundcloud don't offer it considering the algorithms are well known.

I think the claim of it being impossible to patent algorithms in Europe is a bit overstated. In my experience, you just add "Method and apparatus that implements <whatever_algorithm>" and it's granted.

Pretty sure Shazam/Philips/Dolby patents cover Europe.

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