Video ID System For YouTube

YouTube’s upcoming test of a video identification system designed to weed out illegal clips will not be its first this year. Earlier in the spring, Google teamed with Audible Magic to test the fingerprinting of videos on YouTube. Google clearly believes a broader approach is needed to address the concerns of video content owners.

YouTube recently announced the upcoming test of a [tag-tec]video identification system[/tag-tec] designed to week out illegal clips. This is not the first such announcement this spring as previously noted here. YouTube, along with MySpace had teamed up with Audible Magic to test the fingerprinting of videos on its site. YouTube (Google)clearly believes a broader approach is needed to address the concerns of video content owners. To this end they will be testing the new ‘Video ID System’

Digital copyright infringement has been an enormous challenge for many years now. But the severity of the problem has increased tremendously in recent years, driven by the increasingly user friendly technology of the Internet, peer-to-peer software, and popular Web 2.0 sites such as YouTube, MySpace and many more video sharing sites.

There is nothing that focuses the attention of corporate leadership than a large lawsuit to kick start action, so it is that Google and YouTube are taking this additional incentive to ferret out illegal copyrighted video clips sitting on their websites.

The new system will be tested by Time Warner and some additional, as yet, unnamed content owners and, if successful, will enable the content owners to automatically remove protected material from the enormously popular video sharing site. Google will be assessing its new system for accuracy and the speed with which it identifies infringing material. Bringing in well known companies at this early stage will give extra creedance to the tests.

Google has prodigious amounts of storage space, the figures are quite astounding. Google allows me 2865 MB of storage space per ‘gmail account’ and I currently have eight accounts. All my ‘cannot lose’ files are stored with Google, but even they must control their storage space. Weeding out and deleting illegal videos will free up a load of storage space for them.

If they perfect their ‘Video ID System’ then this could be a valuable property that could be licensed to other media sharing sites. Google’s ownership of YouTube, with its millions of videos, gives Google a technological edge in honing its identification software.