Schmidt Says YouTube 'Very Close' to Filtering System

cnetfeed writes "Google CEO says an automated system will soon be available to track pirated content and prevent it from being uploaded to video sharing site. The system was supposed to be rolled out as early as last October, and the long delay in brining the technology online has resulted in ill will from companies like NBC and Viacom. 'Network executives accused Google of stalling so YouTube could reap the big traffic that professionally-created shows generate. Viacom filed a $1 billion lawsuit against Google last month and accused Google of massive intentional copyright infringement. "Ah Viacom," [CEO Eric Schmidt] Schmidt said. "You're either doing business with them or being sued by them...we chose the former, but ended up the latter." Schmidt took the opportunity to poke fun at Microsoft's assertion that Google's pending acquisition of DoubleClick may be a threat to fair competition. Other companies, including Yahoo and AT&T have also asked regulators to review the transaction closely.'"

Comments

"Jump to conclusions" mat anyone?

[Uksi]

Maybe Google can turn Doubleclick into a better company--who knows? I am not drawing any conclusions yet, I want to see what they do with it.

Re:Ode to Google

[FST]

No. Yahoo! bought it.

In any case, isn't it a bad sign when the first post exceeds the length of the article discussing the subject matter?

Re:How could this possibly work?

[javilon]

Second, what if I record, say, a "C.S.I." parody? By rights I should be allowed to post it as such, will my file get flagged as lawsuit-bait and zapped because I used a copyrighted term in the description?

Actually, that situation would be interesting!

You create a "C.S.I" parody video (not very difficult task, by the way) and it gets censored by the automatic filter at google. You sue and google goes to trial and looses. The judge orders google to disable or fix the automatic filter. As they cannot fix it (it is a very hard AI problem to distinguish between a parody and the real thing) they have to disable the tagger.

Google may be interested in actually *loosing* this suit and it would settle a precedent where if a filter filters legitimate uses of the technology it can't be used.

Re:How could this possibly work?

[Anonymous Coward]

Second, what if I record, say, a "C.S.I." parody? By rights I should be allowed to post it as such, will my file get flagged as lawsuit-bait and zapped because I used a copyrighted term in the description?

By what rights? YouTube is a private site and has no obligation to post any submitted video, even if its perfectly legit.

Re:Hard AI ftw!

[miro2]

This is NOT a hard AI problem. This is a problem of measuring various features and statistics of videos that are independent of video format and frame rate, and using those measurements in a hash function. Once you have a good function, the biggest problem is making it independent of video start and end time. The solution is probably done by hashing small time-windows. With small enough time-window segments, one could look for videos with sequential time-window hashes that matched stored copyright material.

absolute bull.

[plasmacutter]

YouTube is a private site and has no obligation to post any submitted video

ahh, the classic republican "but its private property" defense.

once a company reaches a certain size or market share they acquire powers rivalling government, and should be held to the same constitutional standards, otherwise there is no point to the constitution at all, because all the government has to do is privatize everything they can and then claim private property whenever people's civil liberties are violated.

this view does have support, it's been ruled illegal for businesses to place cameras in places like bathrooms, even in their own property. I say it's time to stop being hyppocritically selective about which amendments in the bill of rights are supposed to be protected from corporate greed (laziness counts as greed.. theyre trying to save money at the expense of the first amendment).

additionally, it's currently illegal to discriminate when providing a service. in this case theyre a video sharing site, and have no right to discriminate against video because it "might" lead to lawsuits in the same way gas stations have no right to discriminate against black people (who have a statistically higher criminal prosecution rate) because they "might" be armed robbers. they have to have positive proof before they takedown videos. the dmca notice and takedown system provides that, and it's viacom's responsibility to find and serve notice on the offending videos.