Video Copywrite Infringement
October 12, 2007 by Bruce Walls
With YouTube, the leading free [tag-tec]video sharing site[/tag-tec], facing ongoing lawsuits, from Viacom and the UK Premier Football League, we look at how technology to identify copywited material is becoming smarter and more sophisticated.
Computers can recognise faces in crowds and are used in CCTV systems looking for ‘bad guys’. So sophisticated technology is available to detect images and YouTube and it’s engineers are trying to develope software to detect copywrited video clips that appear on its site.
YouTube said recently it would roll out better technology to help detect copyright-protected video content: “Apart from being reactive and removing content when asked, what we have in place now is our digital hashing technology”.
When someone uploads a video, YouTube feeds the binary digits making up the file into a program that produces a short alpha-numeric string representing that file. Each file’s string, or “hash”, is unique. YouTube can compare the hash for an uploaded video against a database of hashes for copyright files. If it finds a match, it knows that someone else owns the video.
THe USA’s 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The Act put the emphasis on copyright holders notifying violators, who would then remove infringing content. But in the late ’90s, most people were thinking about internet service providers and static websites, not video sharing sites that had not evolved at that time.
But experts back up Viacom’s claims that YouTube’s technology doesn’t work very well. Chief executive of video search company Blinkx , Suranga Chandratillake, says “It’s no solution at all for anyone who has the intent to subvert it”. Changing the colour of a pixel in a single frame or shaving a second of video could change the file’s hash, making it impossible to match it in the database.
That’s why YouTube is working on smarter fingerprinting technology . It still generates a unique string for each file (called a “fingerprint”), but it does this by trying to understand the unique characteristics of the content. This makes it less susceptible to alteration.
You only have to look through any video sharing site to see the amount of copywrited material that is being displayed and what a big challenge it will be to get this technology to work effectively.
[...] increasingly frustrated at the amount of pirated content on the video sharing site. Last March, Viacom, which owns MTV, VH1, Nickelodeon and Comedy Central, sued Google, which owns YouTube, for massive [...]