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Web Scanning Technology for Copyright Violations
eldavojohn writes "I've heard a lot of talk about software being used to detect pirated media anywhere on the web, but haven't seen a lot of details. PhysOrg has a good article on one of the tools out there. Automatic Copyright Infringement Detection (ACID) boasts a patented technology dubbed 'meaning-based computing' that is reportedly capable of finding relationships among 1,000 different types of files. The important thing is that this is not tagging-based searching. 'Autonomy's search technology uses automatic hyperlinking and link clustering that the company claims isn't built into keyword search engines. According to the company, this technology allows computers to perform searches with greater context, so it finds a wider range of related documents or research citations than is possible from keyword searches.' For more details on how this magic works, check out Autonomy's patent and the many patents by its subdivision, Virage."
I find it ironic how stuff like this ends up being the among the more practical applications for AI. I mean, science fiction is usually about robots taking over. Instead, we end up with an internet full of bots trying to sell viagra, bots trying to block viagra, bots trying to break captchas, bots trying to detect copyright infringement, p2p systems to insure privacy, and so on.
I don't think this sort of searching for pirated content is going to be terribly effective, though. I mean, it might be able to catch the blatant stuff like youtube, but ultimately, they're never going to kill p2p, especially once private trackers become more common.