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.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

If you start seeing the quality of mobile shot video on the web improving, don’t assume it’s an improvement on the phone side. MostionDSP’s resolution enhancement could become an industry standard for video sharing sites. You can see the quality of the video enhancement on the company’s sample page or on the MotionDSP user page on YouTube. The difference isn’t huge, but when consumers had a choice between the two I think the demand will be clear.

MotionDSP began in 1998 as a US military funded project at UC Santa Cruz. Its first product provides real time enhancement (meaning a one-minute video will take one minute to enhance) using a system of 3 dual core servers. Those systems start at $30,000 but most large companies will want to buy them in bulk.

A company representative told me that future products could include chips to perform the resolution enhancement on phones or laptops. Anything that can run its algorithm is a potential platform, they said. They have taken about $500,000 in angel funding and are expecting to close Series A funding before end of year, probably in November.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0