Slashdot Mirror


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."

16 of 109 comments (clear)

  1. Google and Youtube aren't that dumb by Salvance · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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
  2. Easiest code EVAR by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Here you go guys, this one's on the house:

    if (content) {
        return "This Youtube content has been identified as: Bad";
    }

    1. Re:Easiest code EVAR by dimeglio · · Score: 4, Funny

      The code is not the problem. Maybe the MPAA was requested to provide the MD5SUM of all the material they object to be published. I suppose they haven't completed this. So it's not necessarily YouTube's fault. ;-)

      10 YouTube exec: So what clips exactly do you want us to remove?
      20 MPAA: well all those which we don't want you to publish.
      30 YouTube exec: Ok, which clips exactly do you object to.
      40 MPAA: all those we don't want you to publish.
      50 GOTO 10

      --
      Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the author.
  3. Relax by Timesprout · · Score: 5, Funny

    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
  4. This should improve content dramatically by nizo · · Score: 4, Funny

    Once all that illegal content is gone, it will make it easier to find things like this.

  5. If I were google I would be worried by LiquidCoooled · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?

    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 :: faster than paper
    1. Re:If I were google I would be worried by trollingsloth · · Score: 3, Funny

      There are no boobies until the third page of results and they aren't even good ones. Please doo some research before you send us on a wild goos chase.

  6. Lawyers Shouldn't Set Tech Deadlines by spike2131 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    --
    SpyDock: Scientific Python in a Docker container
    1. Re:Lawyers Shouldn't Set Tech Deadlines by Herr+Ziffer · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The technology isn't there yet. There are other companies working toward the same goal of media fingerprinting for much longer than YouTube has. For a sufficiently long media clip, it can be done. There serious problem, though, is with smaller clips. 30 seconds just isn't enough material, currently, to get a good match. Add to that the fact that the original clips get resampled and distorted and overdubbed. YouTube may be getting a break from media companies simply "because" it is so easy to make the argument that this was never feasible in the first place.

  7. Is it possible? by ErGalvao · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
    1. Re:Is it possible? by Rob86TA · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The thing is, the MPAA and etc don't care if there are false positives, they only care that they are no escapes. Youtube could probably deploy a solution that would make the MPAA happy, only to have its own users leave as valid content was always accidently being blocked.

    2. Re:Is it possible? by MindStalker · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I'm betting they go with a computer/human pair system. If it matches close to 100% to a known video treat it as if it were the known video. If it matches greater than 50% have a human look at it. If it matches less keep it and wait for a user to flag it. Realistically most youtube videos are near carbon copies of other videos on youtube already. This would greatly decrease dups at least.

  8. Enforce That ! by leftcase · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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'!

  9. Something I noticed with Google Video by shotgunefx · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.
  10. Re:It's all Utube Has by symbolic · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I totally disagree. I rarely pay any attention to the copyrighted stuff, because that's exactly what I'm trying to get away from. The only way that I'd agree with you relates to situations where someone has used a copyrighted work to produce something derivative - like a spoof of a music video, or some music in a home-made video trailer.

    Youtubs is a threat - I don't think it's a threat because people use copyrighted material in this manner, it's a threat because it moves the entertainment decision-making process from the few that used to have nearly complete control, to the end user. It's another paradigm shift that will be fought tooth and nail by the old guard.

  11. Re:No, it's not possible. by jlarocco · · Score: 3, Informative
    You have something better? MD5 is the easiest computationally and produces the smallest result to store, using other techniques will increase the size of your database and computational expense.

    There's no way they could use MD5. MD5 hashes are designed to return the same value given the same input, and a totally different value for even a slight modification of the input. Or in other words, md5("ABCD") is nothing at all like md5("ABCE"). Given the nature of audio and video, it would be trivial to bypass an MD5 copyright check. Change a single pixel in a single frame from RGB(255,255,255) to RGB(255,255,254) and nobody would notice, and it'd get through the check.