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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.
Not to complain about the article too much, but is there anyone out there who didn't find it completely contradictory and useless?
As far as I can tell, the article starts off by saying that they have a wonderful system to inspect and compare the video content of a clip against a HUGE database (eg. tens of thousands of hours of copyrighted movies, TV series, music). And, that they know how to read _any_ media format (eg. an AVI using some particular codec embedded into a Word document which is zipped....) The suggestion is that the software could "read" a Youtube video clip, and recognize that it contains a few minutes of a Jay Leno monologue. Needless to say, they don't explain how they might possibly do this - because, as far as I can tell, they can't. Not even close.
If you look at the patents, they're pretty much all about text or metadata searching. For example, they seem to have found an innovative way to find keywords to categorize a document....by scanning for words in the document! Or of categorizing a video file...by looking at metadata (eg. comments) embedded in the file. The only amazing thing about these algorithms is that some dimbulb in the patent office decided to give them a 20 year monopoly on something people have been doing for decades.
Actually, their technology works exceptionally well, provided you use it in the way it is meant to be used. To use Autonomy for internet spidering is obviously not one of those ways, since its 'meaning-based computing' (read: pattern-recognition) algorithms will turn up text on cats when you were searching for 'dogs' (since they are related terms). People are so used to Google's keyword search that this confuses them utterly.
However, in a corporate intranet environment, this could be VERY useful for 'knowledge workers' like those working in R&D departments. I've managed an Autonomy system for a large multinational and they were using it for search on their internet and intranet sites. The average internet John Doe was complaining like hell, while the employees in R&D and similar functions were loving it.
In this case, using it for detecting copyright infringement could actually work, since the pattern-recognition abilities of Autonomy are in fact very good.