It’s no secret that video sites like YouTube benefited from added traffic generated by hosting copyrighted content. But as these sites get acquired, integrate advertising, or just want to avoid a billion dollar lawsuit, they seek to shed their seedy past to stay kosher with the big media giants they hope will feed them content and advertising dollars.
There are a lot of startups offering technological means of keeping their noses clean. Most of the solutions function as digital detectives, comparing the video fingerprints of copyrighted content with uploaded content for a match. Some of these companies include Audible Magic, Advestigo, Gracenote, MotionDSP, Philips, and iPharo. YouTube has implemented Audible Magic, although I haven’t noticed a difference. MySpace also incorporated Audible Magic but took the added step of banning re-uploading content violating copyright (“Take Down Stay Down” initiative).
However, while computers are great for solving well defined problems at a dizzying pace, they don’t always do that well when the rules become murkier. Judgments need to be made about whether playing a song or video constitutes “fair use” and simply changing a few characters of the title can fool more basic filters. That’s why 5-year-old BayTSP has decided to keep humans in the loop. The WSJ takes an in depth look at the company.
The Journal reports that BayTSP has hired more than 20 “Video Analysts” to watch videos and report copyrighted content starting at $11 an hour. Their searches are helped by BayTSP’s software, which most likely gives them a head start on what to look for. The company’s most notable client is Viacom, which it supplied with the data for their 100,000 video DMCA takedown request last year. Viacom says it pays BayTSP more than $100,000 each month for the service. The takedown requests have resulted in over 230,000 clips being removed from YouTube for Viacom. BayTSP says its error rate on Web videos is only around 0.1%.
Despite these efforts, video piracy remains rampant both on Google video search and many other social video sites. Once content is taken down, some users simply re-upload them to the site. MySpace is apparently countering this behavior through a file blacklist, but other video providers are certainly concerned with pushing away potentially valuable content and users. Content providers have continually leaned on the heavily manual DMCA safe harbor clause, while copyright holders clamor for embedded filtering. Google has recieved a long list of take down notices. AT&T has expressed an interest in filtering their network directly.
One thing’s for sure, there’s still a lot more debate needed amongst us humans before the computers chime in.
There’s a job for you. $11 an hour? I bet they could find people for much less.
I know people who watch these videos all day for free. The only real solution is to find a way to create a system that rewards people for notifying web owners of illegal content.
This just goes to show how much money these big companies are willing to pay to kill content. Crazy.
The digital copyright act says all you have to do is remove the content if the owner asks. So you are in full compliance if you do this. If someone uploads the same video again, it’s on the owner to ask for it to be removed again. And the circle goes round and round and round. The copyright owner’s real complain is with the people uploading the content, not youtube who is complying with each request for removal. Right?
Yeah, I just hired 5 Russian programmers at $2.20 each and I made them make me a website called iRentToYou.com. I didn’t care how they did it as long as they made the site. Now my next step is to find enough morons to use my website. God, I really really hope no one copies and steals my idea and cut me out of the money making loop!
wow it is unbelievable how stupid the old media companies are.
please BayTSP start charging more and bankrupt those retarded dinosaurs.
It’s good to see that computers haven’t completely put labor out of business.
Why cant old media just adapt? There is plenty of ways they could monetise their content being plastered everywhere if they just stopped wasting time and money clinging to their precious DMCA. If they just put ads on their content and uploaded it themselves they wouldnt have issues with users uploading their content.
They’re much better off doing something like Wikipedia, where people are rewarded for successfully reporting copyrighted content.
Do we have really enough time to provide copyright protection ?
At the end if we want to have such protection, we know it is a neverending story.
We have to count on webcrawlers and regular control and find a balance between the benefit and the cost (in time I mean) of legal steps, reminders, warning , …
Boubékeur
http://boubekeu...blog.lemonde.fr
@alaska: great story! step 3: profit.
@nerd forum: youtube, etc. should have some sort of paid premium service that a user can keep getting for free if they keep reporting x number of copyright violations.
how long did it take them to remove the 230,000 videos? at $100,000 a month you have to wonder how cost effective it is. Do they think they are losing more in revenue a month because of it? If I had stock in them I would be asking some hard questions to whoever ok’d this move.
Instead of wasting all this time and money taking stuff down I would bet they would make more money by using these channels to promote their content.
Well how long before these jobs get shipped overseas…
Anyways the manual approach is probably the best way to control content.
Recently I wrote about Megavideo. As they are offering unlimited length videos and 5GB space, they will have to utilize such services to prevent piracy.
http://abhishek...ff-in-tubetown/
Well..many a times startups don’t care about copyrighted content..(and everybdy hinges onto youtube’s success!)…
came across this interesting discussion on copyright issues that startups should be aware of..
http://www.plug...t-of-copyrights
SignedMedia seems to be offering copyright protection and porn detection way cheaper than BayTSP. We are in discussions with them for getting this service and some custom solution applied to our website.
http://www.signedmedia.com
Just FYI, BayTSP goes back more than 5 years — at least since 1999 or 2000 because I remember meeting Mark right after he launched it.
Originally, he focused on 2257 compliance for the adult industry.
http://www.goog...p;q=baytsp+2257
– James
Heyyy…There’s now more work for the WiPros and Tatas of India…Forget $11 an hour, get the international companies for the manual labor…As for automation, there needs to be better audio recognition and the issues need to be cleaned up for maximum advantages in adding content and protecting the site(s) from piracy… piracy is definitely widely rampant these days.
Great post. I tend to agree with KingJacob, on the advertising angle.
I was at the Stanford E-Commerce summit when attorneys for Google/YouTube were defending their DCMA practices. According to the Google attorney, Google/YouTube has trouble differentiating between an infringing copyrighted video clips and viral marketing campaigns. According to the attorney, viral campaigns often but accidentally conflict with the DCMA, putting publishers in the awkward position of being served with a DCMA violation notice from a movie content owner, only later to find that the “offending” clip was part of a studio viral marketing campaign for the movie. In the story the “offending” viral campaign was for the movie “Knocked-Up.” Which means even movie studios cannot internally track what is protected copyright content and what is not.
I’m not sure how the TSPBay “analysts” and their software can solve that problem.
Ad tagging technology, like ScanScout’s, that uses aural, visual, and text tagging is more advanced than a room full of guys eating popcorn and watching videos. Moreover, using a categorizing and tagging ad-serving system like ScanScout’s makes more sense then continuing to abuse the DCMA.
Everyone I know in the in the legal community agrees that Google/YouTube doesn’t have a leg to stand on—they know they are allowing copyrighted material to post. This is obvious when SNL’s “D*ck in a Box” clip (which now has an Emmy nomination, thanks in large part to YouTube) has been up and running since December. Nothing is free. I’d rather have access to the content and see a tiny message at the bottom of the screen, than be barred from repeat viewings of my favorite clips. I say drop in the ads and move on.