Perhaps that's why the post is back up - I don't believe the bits and pieces described in the article are patentable. (Fourier has been used in signal processing for decades. Adding a nearest-neighbor lookup - also know for decades - is a trivial extension.)

I did a master degree on pattern matching on text in 1999 (same year Shazam started), and it was obvious then that much of the same concepts (many of them from textbooks stemming from the 1970s) could be used for pattern matching on music. (We even discussed implementing music matching, but couldn't see a market for it.)

There may very well be other parts of music fingerprint algorithms that are patentable, but I have a hard time believing that the parts described in the article could be.