Via Slashdot, a story about how the digital fingerprint used by CDDB to identify the title, artist and other information about music tracks in iTunes was used to uncover a musical fraud:

The recordings of a British concert pianist who found fame in the last years of her life have been exposed as hoaxes – by Apple’s iTunes music player.

Joyce Hatto died in June 2006, having become a cause célèbre with fans of classical piano in the last years of her life. A series of recordings showed her masterful command of a wide range of composers including Liszt, Schubert, Rachmaninov, Dukas and more.

Last week, a critic at the Gramophone magazine got [a] surprise when he put a Hatto recording of Lizt’s 12 Transcendental Studies into his computer. The iTunes player identified the disc as being recorded by another pianist, Lászlo Simon. He dug out the Simon album and found it sounded exactly the same as the Hatto one.

iTunes had stumbled on a hoax. To identify albums it calculates a ‘discid’ from the duration of the tracks and then connects to the Compact Disc Database online. The Gramophone critic tried another disc – Hatto playing Rachmaninov – and again iTunes identified it as belonging to someone else. Again, the named recording – by Yefim Bronfman – sounded no different.

I’ve seen a good deal of research in recent history dealing with the automatic detection of plagiarism, or of the unauthorized use of digital images on the web. I would guess that the RIAA and their cronies even use technology along these lines to track down copyrighted music and movies available for download (illegally) on file-sharing sites. But this particular application of the web, and how it all came about by accident, is just fascinating to me.