I doubt anything will happen. Stories with similar elements don't usually end with an underdog victory [1]. If the software was already released, people could create "I'm mirroring the Shazam code, come and get me Shazam!" blog posts. The news cycle would have been well-fed, and might have generated enough hype to cause the Shazam CTO to learn to leave the issue untouched.

However, now someone must develop the code. It'll take time. When it is done there will only be passing interest in the whole issue. This is interesting enough that it'll get some action on blogs over the next week, but I don't see this becoming a long-term win for the original author. Just Shazam and the blogs.

[1] One example is "How I Got Sued by Facebook". http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2010/04/how-i-go... . It combines elements hackers love: the rights to your information, an underdog, free speech, and an interesting technical problem (indexing all of Facebook). But no public databases of Facebook user data sprung up as a result.

The reason for that is that people who have capabilities of doing that know that its not a good thing. The data can be used for re identification attacks against user privacy.

Alistair Cockburn (agile authority and creator of Crystal methodologies) comented about this on twitter ( http://twitter.com/TotherAlistair/status/18053308892 ): Simply putting Shazam code on a website wouldn't be patent infringement (AFAIK) because the patent itself does that and is public reading.

Hasn't MusicBrainz.org being doing this in the Open Source for a long time? At least longer than I personally remember knowing about Shazam at all. All of their code is some variant of GPL.

AFAIK, MusicBrainz just relies on metadata associated with a music file and its length. It doesn't actually derive an audio fingerprint from the music, like Shazam does.