MusicIP, which claims it is the first global search engine for music, was granted a patent for its music fingerprinting technology. The press release says "The technology in the patent identifies digital music tracks at the master-recording level, by the actual sounds in the track."

While it sounds nifty, it is not clear how unique the technology is, how valid the patent is, or what this means to competition in the fingerprinting/metadata field that already has numerous players.

More from the release (ignore the hyperbole):

In a bold initiative this month, MusicIP released the Open Fingerprint Architecture™ into the marketplace with client libraries available under an Open Source license. This pioneering move provides the digital music industry with an effective, yet inexpensive identification mechanism which can be used by music enterprises of all kinds, including digital music stores, content delivery enterprises, and independent and micro-record labels.

With the Open Fingerprint Architecture, digital tracks can be identified consistently against MusicIP's Music Digital Naming Service™ (MusicDNS) dataset of more than 17 million analyzed songs, providing a simple, dependable Web service to identify music tracks and provide basic metadata. Under the Open Source license options, the public-domain track metadata returned by MusicDNS can be used freely for any application needs.