Patent ID: 8112818

Claim:
A method, implemented by a computing system programmed to perform the following, comprising: selecting, by the computing system, a portion of data of an unknown work; detecting, by the computing system, each event in said portion of data of said unknown work, wherein an event is a perceptual occurrence in a work that can be successively positioned in time; determining, by the computing system, an event metric between each successive event in said portion of data in said unknown work; generating, by the computing system, a first list of event metrics between said events for said unknown work; receiving, by the computing system, a second list of event metrics for a known work; generating, by the computing system, a third list comprising events in the first list that match events in the second list by performing a comparison to determine whether an Mth event of the first list matches an Nth event of the second list, wherein M is an index over events in the first list and N is an index over events in the second list; responsive to a determination of a match, adding the matching events to the third list and incrementing the index N; responsive to a determination that there is not a match, incrementing the index M, wherein the comparison is performed until the index N is greater than or equal to a number of events in the second list and the index M is greater than a threshold; and determining said unknown work is a copy of said known work based on the third list comprising the events in the first list that match events in the second list.