October 15, 2007

YouTube Tries a Little Harder to Protect Copyright Holders

Mark Hendrickson

19 comments »

Google is finally putting some teeth behind its heretofore dubious assurance that it really does want to keep copyrighted material off YouTube.

The company has announced a beta version of technology called “YouTube Video Identification” that is meant to help copyright holders control the distribution of their content. Here’s how it works:

Copyright holders, such as Time Warner, Disney and CBS (who helped Google test the new identification system), upload full digital copies of their content to YouTube. These copies are not distributed by YouTube at all. Rather, they are stored privately by YouTube so it will know how to recognize copyrighted content.

The copyright holders who upload their content then indicate whether they want YouTube to automatically remove uploaded copies of the same content, or whether they want YouTube to forcefully display advertisements on top of uploaded copies of the same content (revenue from which will go into the copyright holders’ pockets).

The video identification system will know when to remove a copyrighted video or display advertisements, because it will scan the frames of all uploaded videos and use a complex set of algorithms that compares them to those in YouTube’s stockpile of copyrighted material. The system won’t be perfect, of course, and poor copies of copyrighted material in particular can be expected to slip underneath the radar.

While this new technology appears to be YouTube’s biggest effort to stop the distribution of copyrighted material to date, many copyright holders will inevitably cry foul at YouTube’s insistence that they must manually hand over full copies of their content before they are given any serious protection. It’s hard to believe this effort will do much to pacify Viacom, which brought a $1 billion lawsuit against YouTube this past May.

In today’s announcement, Google outlines all of the anti-piracy measures it takes in addition to this video identification system. Users who repeatedly upload content that is eventually taken down as the result of DMCA notices are banned; hash codes of removed content are stored so that exact copies of the content cannot be uploaded again; only 10-minute long videos are allowed; copyright holders have access to an “electronic notification and takedown tool;” and users are shown “copyright tips” when they upload content.

YouTube, which has developed this new image recognition technology internally, will continue to use Audible Magic for detecting copyrighted audio in video uploads.

In large part via Webware.

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This entry was posted on Monday, October 15th, 2007 at 6:37 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Comments

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Gary Mckenzie

October 15th, 2007 at 6:51 pm

1st. its about time, with all that “brain power” at google, i was begining to wonder how much longer they were going to “take advantage” of the big media companies.

Would it require someone else suing them for 10 billion. The value of facebook?
Dan Ackerman Greenberg

October 15th, 2007 at 7:09 pm

So I guess this means I can’t watch Family Guy anymore on YouTube, huh?

It seems to me like the harder Google pushes to remove copyrighted content from YouTube, the larger the opportunity becomes for Hulu (or someone else) to come in and offer the next generation of on-demand video entertainment with “real” (non user generated) content.

I haven’t heard anything about Hulu for a while now despite their supposed “October beta”….any inside info, Mark?

Dan
http://www.ackermangreenberg.com
Andrew

October 15th, 2007 at 7:12 pm

I see a monetization in the works.

a) All of the big companies will make the effort to supply Youtube with good qualities of their videos. Movies, Shows etc.
b) YouTube gathers all that stuff, and builds the largest database of top quality videos.
c) Youtube offers the media companies to enter into a partnership. “Hey guys, you already have the stuff uploaded…why not sell the premium content to our millions of users? And blammo you got YouTube premium content…where you pay $10 a month to watch good quality videos. or pay $1 to watch each premium youtube link. Why waste $8 to go to a movie theater, or waste a day downloading the stuff off bittorrent…where for just a few bucks you can stream that same movie, with the best quality setting on YouTube.
techmine

October 15th, 2007 at 7:26 pm

What about “smartly edited” versions of original copyrighted material that is going to be uploaded by YouTube’s users? Its going to happen more and more now. If that is enforced, people will turn towards other sites and so on. This will never end. Google senses this but they cannot live with the risk of getting sued by tom dick and harry.
Jeremy Steele

October 15th, 2007 at 7:31 pm

You know… I haven’t even been on YouTube in almost a month…
desik

October 15th, 2007 at 7:35 pm

Wont stop anyone posting copyrighted material on YouTube or anywhere else , perish the thought, but I guess Google simply want to encourage the media companies to see how they can profitably use YouTube if and when their copyrighted material is put out there.

Bit like a father buying wedding rings in anticipation of his sons getting the local girls pregrant - not so much a form of protection as a means to develop better relationships.
Don Wilson

October 15th, 2007 at 8:08 pm

This is one area where manual will always work better than technological advancement. I’m sure, given a dictionary list of terms, YouTube could have 95% of their illegal content removed in a week or two, but they wouldn’t want that.

BTW, what the hell happened to the YouTube-iPhone integration? Still most videos don’t work on my iPhone.
ChrisD

October 15th, 2007 at 8:23 pm

Video Identification systems are really tricky to make robust. I’m sure this will be easily subverted without resorting to low-res copies.
Browse

October 15th, 2007 at 8:30 pm

Fair use?
David Mackey

October 15th, 2007 at 8:58 pm

This seems to be a pretty significant attempt on Google’s part to stop copyright infringement. It also is nice for consumers as they are encouraging video copyright holders not to take the videos down, but rather to easily and quickly commercialize them.
Pierre Col | UbicMedia

October 16th, 2007 at 5:21 am

100% bullshit : you can easily and automatically - see for instance good stuff like http://www.erightsoft.com/SUPER.html - convert copyrighted material from a DVD (MPEG-2) to AVI then to MPEG-4, during the process you change the frame rate and resize the screen : no way for Youtube to link the illegaly uploaded material to the original copyrighted one, and to stop the diffusion of copyrighted material.

This kind of annoucement are purely legal moves, trying to calm down companies like Viacom and others…
Pierre Col | UbicMedia

October 16th, 2007 at 5:25 am

@Andrew : quality films can not be streamed at a reasonable cost : Youtube provides very poor quality because is is a trade off to limit the cost.

To provide movies over the Internet with DVD or near-DVD quality, able to be showed on a 42″ flat screen, and not even speaking of HD quality (and its coming now!), the only way to deliver the content at a low cost is to use P2P technologies.
LonelyBloggers

October 16th, 2007 at 4:16 pm

Now if YouTube could address their growing spam problem… With tons of automated friends/comments software out there it’s getting totally out of control.. It’s getting to the point where you just want to shut down your account with them as I get hammered with YouTube comment spam daily and they don’t do a thing about it….
Piece of the pie

October 16th, 2007 at 6:44 pm

Now what happens if it falsely classifies a video as belonging to a major company, and they monetize it? Can one sue? Whom? What’s the dispute policy? I wonder how DMCA and safe harbor would cover Google and their copyright “owner” partner in that case (I’d venture it doesn’t cover at all).
Then you have parodies and things covered under fair use (excerpts used within original content).

I’m guessing there will be a few high profile lawsuits to flesh out this aspect.

A really interesting move. I do however wonder what the legal ramifications of all this will be. I personally think it’s going to be a giant mess. Companies suing companies, class actions lawsuits, etc. etc.

Then what’s Google’s liability if the SW misses something?
Venkat

October 18th, 2007 at 12:38 pm

What is Google’s liability? I think full. Drop youtube, than wanting to make money greedily, then you don’t become liable at all World without youtube will still function just fine.

Drop some frames, stick in unrelated frames, change fps, crop video, lower quality, superimpose something, etc. Google brains Vs non-Google brains, which one will be more powerful, yes Google can be outsmarted. Anyway I am not preaching copyright violation by any means.