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YouTube's Content Identification Failure Raises Eyebrows
MSNBC is carrying a story looking at YouTube's failure to follow through with a promised 'content identification system' by the end of the year. The article goes on to discuss the possible impact this failure will have on the site's (so far) good relations with television, music, and movie studios. From the article: "If the delay lasts for more than a week or two into the new year, suggesting more than just a slight technical hitch, 'this is certainly going to be a serious issue', [Mike McGuire, a digital media analyst at Gartner] added. Leading music companies have already made clear they see completion of YouTube's anti-piracy technology as an important step in any closer co-operation. Failure to build adequate systems to protect copyright owners could also add to the risk of legal action against the site."
It's hard to believe that Google hasn't already discussed the delay and any consequences with the movie, television, and music studios. Google had such intensive conversations with them before purchasing YouTube, that it would be silly if they went quiet and just let things slide.
Crack - Free with every butt and set of boobs
Here you go guys, this one's on the house:
if (content) {
return "This Youtube content has been identified as: Bad";
}
Its in Beta.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Once all that illegal content is gone, it will make it easier to find things like this.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Because once they show that they can identify bad content within video files won't the MPAA/RIAA/* start to bug them about soing the same with normal search results?
:(
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Instead of Perfect 10 having to search and list the illegal boobies on display, google will have to automatically remove them from view
Won't somebody think of the boobies
liqbase
Does Microsoft own anything comparable to YouTube?
Squish one, two more pop up in it's place. Remove it once, someone out there will just repost. Lather, rinse, repeat... They'll be pushing this rock up the hill forever...
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
I pity the developers who are making this product. They have been given a complex task and an arbitrarily chosen deadline, probably pulled out of the air by marketing/legal/upper management. Since September they have been on a death march to meet this date, sacrificing family time around the holiday season.
But you know what? It just ain't ready because it was a fools errand to begin with. My guess is they are working off of half-assed specs that weren't even ready before Thanksgiving. Maybe in a few more months they can have something good. But media partners getting pissy about it isn't going to help the code mature any faster.
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http://soapbox.msn.com/
This may sound a little OT - sorry for that - but this story raised an old question here: is it really possible to do an automated content identifier/filter solution? Personally I've always found these kind of solutions full of flaws. Take web surfing filtering for an instance: it's pretty common that the filtering software makes a mistake and end up identifying a "false positive bad content site". After all - google or not - both things follow the same basic principles, right?
Er Galvão Abbott - IT Consultant and Developer
Some of us could certainly think of ways to easily identify video content. I've thought of a way. I don't know if it is feasible but I'm not going to post the idea here. If anything, I'd patent to to keep it from being used. Why help an industry who is so consumer unfriendly?
Content producers wouldn't license their content to Google/YouTube if they weren't getting something out of it (either money or free advertising). And as we've seen in the past, when it comes to money, the content producers would rather make more of it, even in the face of rampant unauthorized duplication, rather than follow through on their threats to take their toys and go home.
The content producers who are going to license their content will ultimately do so without any sort of detection scheme, and the ones who don't license their content can continue to do things the old fashioned way, i.e., DMCA takedown requests.
It will be interesting to see how long YouTube can stay in the lead for video. It will give other sites like MySpace, Facebook, and Grapheety some way to evaluate themselves. This web 2.0 thing could be making some changes soon...
Isn't all they need to comply with DMCA a link to allow reporting of DMCA violation/copyrighted protected content and removing of the content once verified?
Utube is in no hurry to get rid of the copyrighted stuff because it's all they have. Once that stuff is gone, they will go the way of Napster and Scour. The world only needs so many videos of some dad getting racked in the balls with a baseball bat.
So long, Utube....you were great while we had ye.
-E
Given that the media and entertainment industry has made such a miserable job of enforcing copyright since the emergence high speed internet, perhaps their efforts would be better spent figuring out ways to capitalise on the presence of sites such as youtube and myspace.
If businesses such as Red Hat can make a living from open-source software, surely there's a more refined way for said media businesses to realise capital from their assets without being so 'grabby'!
This podcast talks about pretty much the same thing as this article.
The solution would be to perform some sort of hash check against previously taken down material. So actually posting copyrighted material once and having it spotted, would stop it from recurring on the system. It just needs to still match submittions with bits cut out and varying watermarks and source qualities with some kind of identification algorythm. (similar to fingerprinting)
Only one video I ever uploaded was not posted immediately. It was a demonstration of a touchscreen media player I'm working on (Was one of a couple vids I uploaded that night). I was playing copyrighted material in the demo, but no song played very long before moving on and the audio (as it was off camcorder) was horrible.
About 12 hours later, it cleared. Fairly certain it was flagged and reviewed. If that's the compromise, I think I could deal with that.
-William Shatner can be neither created nor destroyed.
To take away your fair use they would have to fingerprint both the audio and video content. That's possible for whole works at a given frame size, rate and audio quality. Already, you can see the problem because there's an almost unlimited choice of those. Couple that problem to every length variation and you have an impossible task for any single work. The database of fingerprints would be infinitely large. You can multiply this infinite sized database time the hundreds of thousands of works the crackpots want to "protect" for a result thats that many times less practical. Policing for original works based on someone else's "intellectual property," such as a Star Wars parody, is clearly impossible. The already impractical task of making fingerprints of each submission is trivial by comparison. Even if they could fingerprint all submissions, there is no way they can match it to their satisfaction. Policing will require AI or a human inspector because the "crime" is sharing the details of a story, something only a person can recognize. If they do make it work, the first thing it will do is point to the blatant theft of concepts by every movie ever made, such as Star War's liberal use of "Triumph of Will", "Forbidden Planet" and several WWII films.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Not only that, but they've done a shit job of copy-protection too. Name one form of copy protection that hasn't been hacked shortly after inception, whether through reverse-engineering, number crunching, or a plain ol black sharpie. Not only that, but name ones that haven't made life more inconvenient for legal users than potential infringers.
The fact is that the ??AA would just love to have youtube create a system that could effectively single out copyrighted works, because it would save them the trouble and then they could cram it down the throats of every P2P provider and/or ISP around while threatening lawsuits for non-compliance.
Why does the *AA always move to the default assumption that internet distribution of content == EVIL?
I would argue that Youtube and other services like it are very similar if not the same as a television channel. Instead of trying to police Youtube for copyright infringement, why not collaborate on a similar business model as television? The video service would pay for some type of broadcast fee presumably via advertising revenue just like television. For videos that are more popular the advertising space costs more along the same lines as advertising during the Super Bowl being premium.
Why can't the *AA see that these services are not evil but rather a huge business opportunity?
We'll make great pets
Mike McGuire, a digital media analyst at Gartner, says [T]he technology industry really has to start living up to the media industry's expectations ....
Maybe it's the other way around, the media industry needs to start living up to the expectations of the technology industry.
I don't understand why the content providers don't just embed their content with banner advertising overlays and distribute it online themselves. I guess these guys are so stuck in 20th century television mode they just don't get it.
Huh? I assume by copyright "owners" they mean copyright "holders". I don't think there's ever been any claim that any holder has ever been put at risk by YouTube. It's possible that copyrights might be infringed via YouTube, but that hardly amounts to a risk to the holder of that copyright.
Why should YouTube waste the CPU cycles in a futile attempt to seek out copyrighted material? First, they are not legally obligated to. It's up to the holder to complain if there's an issue and THEN it is YouTube's responsibility to take it down.
How can YouTube possibly mechanically identify infringement? Pretty much all of the content on YouTube is copyrighted, including all the stupid videos of people falling off chairs or dog's chasing remote-controlled cars. There's no property inherent to the video itself that can identify the content is infringing unless it's identical to known content that the copyright holder has indicated would be infringing. Further, technically the content isn't technically infringing until so adjudicated in court (infringement is decided on a case-by-case basis). So what are they supposed to do, piss away millions trying to appease an industry group that their clients despise so that they can make their product less appealing despite the fact that they have no legal obligation to do so? Dumb.
Haven't we already seen filtering attempts like this with the old Napster? That failed miserably because at the end of the day, there is just too much content to be checked and defeating automated id systems is relatively easy. Now it may be that that has changed, but still the sheer volume of content is likely to slow things down noticeably. And as others have already noted, if the system successfully removes illegally uploaded content, then why are people going to bother with YouTube anymore?
In the end, technology is not going to yield a solution to the copyright violation problem for a service like YouTube. What they really have to do is drive home the need to make deals with the content owners so that the owners get a mutually acceptable cut of the revenues. Both sides need to realize that there is no perfect solution, but they can all still make money on the deal. Alas, this all requires more good sense than has been displayed so far, especially by the media companies.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
When you do this, YouTube will drop like a rock in popularity, depending how good job you did.
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The easiest thing to do is simply make the fingerprints cover more stuff ("fuzzing" the fingerprint is a pretty good mental model), which definitely increases the false-positive rate on audio.
I would have thought the easiest thing to do would be to take the Vista approach: all video will be reduced to a 2x2 pixel screen size. Content will easy to identify that way, because it will all look the same.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
From the URL: "Verimatrix is dedicated to the protection of our client's digital creations and securing operator's revenue streams. The Verimatrix Content Authority System (VCAS) is a software-based solution that increases content security over Internet Protocol (IP) systems. There are no smart cards, it's easy to deploy and we can trace piracy to its source."
I've seen this work. You can use a handheld camera with a different frame rate in a movie theater tilted off angle and the water mark hidden in the meida will show up.
Myspace licensed Gracenote's acoustic fingerprinting technology last year. http://www.drmwatch.com/ocr/article.php/3641591
Gracenote's failure and inability to deliver on promised recognition rates and performance is directly related to Myspace's failure to deploy a comprehensive system by year's end.
I am astonished that Slashdot has not picked up on the fact that Gracenote uses community submissions via its user-submited database (CDDB and MusicID) to turnaround and police the community. Everytime you enter music metadata to Gracenote's database, it could be used against you in a court of law.
So, YouTube is going to build an automated system that can tell that the movie clip in my video is part of my online review of said movie and is thereby covered under fair use? Or that my video which uses a famous pop song is a parody of that song and also covered by fair use? The only way to build a system to detect copyright infringement is to ignore fair use. I'm sure that makes the MPAA and the RIAA happy, but it really isn't viable.
In some ways I agree that the copyright holders should control the content but at the same time I can see they are missing a golden opportunity to "promote" their content on youtube. To give you an example, I like watching Anime but as anyone knows "my favorites are someone else's rubbish". So how do I know if I "like" the content on a DVD? Well when someone mentions a new Anime series I can go look at a review but as previously stated thats not always a good method or I can go look on youtube for an episode. Now with youtube removing most if not all the anime episodes I can only confirm that a handful suite my needs. So Im stuck with either bittorenting the first episode or just not buying the series at all because I cant confirm anything about the series with any certainty anymore. I think the content managers have gotten to the point that the controls are so harsh on the content that people "who want to pay for it" are starting to walk away. Not only is it an insult to be called a thief every time you play the dam thing but I don't want to be told how and when to play "what I've paid for".
Yeah, I'd say it's a failure. I've yet to see any content on youtube.
The only practical way to do this is to utilize the army of users to police the site. Set up some kind of tagging or flagging system where users can flag a video as "copyrighted music" or "copyrighted video." Perhaps a meta-moderation system on top of the base level can assure smooth functioning. At the top a smaller army of actual people will have to make decisions about fair use etc. This site, and craigslist employ similar strategies relatively effectively. It'll be the first ever web2.0 social snitching system!
-- QED
Star Wars is not nearly as homoerotic as Triumph of the Will.
How do you get "homoerotic" out of a film made by a woman? The thing is a long nightmare of twisted sentiment, logic and fanaticism, brilliantly captured, with one awful end - 25% of the people you see will die violently and no two bricks will be left standing a few short years after filming. The sexual aspects of boys playing escaped me. To each, their own.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
There are companies like Auditude that already have working solutions. Google is actually trying to re-invent the wheel on this one.
Seriously, is anyone that is even slightly aware of the state-of-the-art pattern recognition algorithms surprised? This is a case of popular culture leading people to believe that pattern recognition software is ahead of where it is. Every semester, PHD and masters students at literally 100's of universities try their hands at this (not to mention industry researchers/professors). People have been studying the top techniques used in this field for years, and there is no suggestion yet that this problem is remotely solved.
Believe me, a hashtable is used as the most pitiful of strawmen. Do yourself a favor, research topics like face recognition and face detection, it is an interesting topic. Look at the methods that are commonly used. If you have an idea that no one had tried, by all means, post it. To people familiar with the subject, this is akin to flying cars. That doesn't mean that is won't be solved first, it just means that the top industry/university results are very poor. Similar to how we can levitate a vehicle, but a national flying car program is laughable.
Say a classification algorithm has a 96% failure rate (far better than the best of these systems under realistic conditions):
If you sample 1,000,000 videos, 40,000 will be classified incorrectly. Let's pretend that magically YouTube only screens these videos. That is an awful lot of employees checking for false positives and false negatives. Given present technology, it is predictable that this would be the case.
Several months from now, you will see another story about how pattern recognition isn't able to classify the web 100% or some other notion. Read up on the topic and set the record straight.
Why should YouTube be responsible for this? I guess YouTube is giving an outlet for people to break copy write. However, any company that makes CD-R's is giving an outlet for people to do the same, but in that case the CD manufacturers are not responsible. Is there a difference because it's hosted online, so they're hosting illegal content?
Any person should already know it's illegal to post copy write material in this way. Even if you didn't know already I'm also sure YouTube's TOS covers this and you have to agree to the TOS to post anything on their site. So isn't the person posting the material doing the illegal act and the one who should be take responsibility?
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