Patent ID: 8584197

Claim:
A computer-implemented method for determining ownership rights to a composition, the method comprising: receiving, by a computing device, an input media file, the input media file comprising an audio clip digitally representing a sound recording; processing, by the computing device, the audio clip to extract dominant musical tones in the audio clip at a plurality of times within the audio clip, the extracted tones corresponding to notes of a musical scale; determining, by the computing device, pitch intervals between consecutive ones of the dominant musical tones extracted from the audio clip; generating, by the computing device, an input melody fingerprint from a sequence of the pitch intervals for the audio clip, the input melody fingerprint representing a melody of a composition that is embodied in the audio clip, the melody fingerprint being invariant to parameters used to perform or record a performance of the composition; querying, by the computing device, a reference database for a reference melody fingerprint that matches the input melody fingerprint, each reference melody fingerprint in the reference database representing a melody that is embodied in a reference sound recording; responsive to a matching reference melody fingerprint for the input melody fingerprint being found, determining by the computing device, ownership information for the composition from ownership information that is associated with the matching reference melody fingerprint; and generating, by the computing device, a claim on behalf of an owner of the composition that matches the composition, the owner determined from the ownership information.