MySpace Begins Rollout of Video Monitoring Tech

C|Net is carrying an article looking into new technology MySpace is rolling out to combat user violation of copyright laws on their pages. Called 'Take Down, Stay Down', the service will attempt to ensure that once content is removed because of a complaint it can never be uploaded again. "Copyright owners have access to Take Down Stay Down free of charge, according to a release from MySpace. If the social-networking service receives a takedown notice regarding a copyrighted clip hosted through its MySpace Videos hosting service, MySpace's new feature will take a 'digital fingerprint' of the video and add it to a copyright filter that blocks the content from being uploaded again. '(It's) the ability to have a piece of content imprinted and put in a database so we can identify it,' said Vance Ikezoye, CEO of Audible Magic." The article goes on to discuss the problems YouTube is facing with the same issues, as well as recent investigations of this issue in the political arena.

Comments

Bogus take-downs.

[Anonymous Coward]

Are they going to have a mechanism to fix bogus take-downs? Will it be effective? Could someone with an SCO mentality take down half the site?

hacking call to arms

[plierhead]

I guess I've never really understood the hacker ethic but reading this it sounds almost like some kind of challenge...

And then there's the issue of how well it will actually work, or if MySpace is just trying to save face. Cynical observers might be quick to ask how soon clever hackers will figure out a way to work around or even completely circumvent the "digital fingerprints." According to Ikezoye, it's not going to be easy because Audio Magic's patented technology is more complicated than simply generating a "hash value" for a file.

"A fingerprint is much more robust at identifying the content. Hashes identify files," he explained. If a Colbert Report clip were pulled at Viacom's request, for example, MySpace's filter would block all other forms of the file from MPEG to AVI, all various degrees of quality, and even video clips that contained only part of the content from the piece that had been taken down. "We simulate the human perception of the same content," Ikezoye said.

And to circumvent the filter, he added, a hacker would have to "screw up the content itself so it wasn't recognizable," to a degree where it wouldn't even be worth uploading in the first place.

But given hackers' long history of being able to get through just about anything, experts remain a bit skeptical.

Re:hacking call to arms

[Animaether]

fwiw - no, it catches that.

Most video fingerprinting technology can deal with mirroring, rotating, shearing, compression, time stretching, channel swapping (RGB and YUV), and practically any other method you can think of. One thing you -can- is chop it up into fragments that are smaller than the watermarking window, and distribute those fragments across the canvas randomly. The problem with that (and, actually, almost all of the aforementioned methods) is that the video is unwatchable and compresses horribly. The latter you're stuck with, the former you could code a special plugin for that unscrambles the video. But at that point, it's no longer video for the masses.

I'm sure other posters have already pointed out that people will just upload/download on a different service, etc. so I won't go into that here.. nor the possible (unlikely, but possible) 'fair use' issues.

Re:hacking call to arms

[Blue Stone]

>If a Colbert Report clip were pulled at Viacom's request, for example, MySpace's filter would block all other forms of the file from MPEG to AVI, all various degrees of quality, and even video clips that contained only part of the content from the piece that had been taken down.

Translation: In Rupert'sSpace there is no Fair Use.

Not so simple....

[janrinok]

OK, if it is able to identify 'content' - and does not use a human to provide this function but achieves it entirely in software - then it must take a series of snapshots of the video and use some form of key (or hash?) for each snapshot. That is not a hash for the entire file but a series of hashes which can provide a unique fingerprint. The processing power required to do this, and to subsequently search submissions in an attempt to find a matching hash will be immense. Pattern recognition is improving all the time but it is still nowhere near able to recognise content(i.e. girl dancing in bedroom, skateboarder falling arse over tit etc) with sufficient accuracy to enable PR to be used. If this problem HAS been solved, I would expect the military and other scientific fields to be investing in it far more than a web video hosting site.

Hmmm....

[evilgrug]

The bold claims made in this article make me even more skeptical. If the technology could really identify 'content' in the way they describe -- handling different forms, resolutions, lengths partial clips, watermarks and other changes --- with reasonable time and processing constraints, it would be a lot more valuable in other fields than as a form of DRM protection. At the very least I would be wondering if it would only be monitoring the audio track of the accompanying video to determine its matches.

It reminds me of the claims made by various "smart" porn blockers that "know" naked flesh from regular skin tones and photos -- generally it's nothing but baseless hype, or it's going to find a lot of false positives.

Re:Hmmm....

[Kjella]

Well, here's my idea. It's right off the top of my head, so it's probably patented:

To create the fingerprint:
1. Transform the frames to contrast edges. I forget what the filter is called but it'll basicly give you an outline of all the edges, with very little info
2. Split the frame into squares, calculate a brightness value from the edge frame
3. Throw all of this into a database

To check the fingerprint:
1. Decode a few keyframes
2. Calculate same info for those frames
3. Use a quick sort on brightness to find candidate frames. Don't require 100% match, make it so that a frame with a few watermarked squares will still score
4. Sanity check for file/location in other clip
5. Second pass either taking more frames, matching constrast lines or something, plenty opportunities here

Example, if they've blocked "mymovie.avi" with an NBC logo, and you're trying to match it against "othermovie.mpg" with a Fox logo:
1. Pick frames 154, 437, 1023, 2022 from Fox clip
2. Do the math
3. Find candidate matches
4. If they so *roughly* match frames 184, 467, 1053, 2052 in mymovie.avi you have a probable match with a 30 frame offset. In practise, just require an approximate match because of different commercial cut-offs
5. Verify match more closely

Sounds to me like a not too heavy job. It's very hard to fuck with because contrast lines are basicly the content of the picture. The same clip of a person walking will be approximately the same no matter how badly you fuck with it. Maybe you need to normalize it a bit if people try to upload high/low contrast vid to get around it, but that's going to look like shit anyway.

Re:The search for the Holy Grail

[femto]

Why bother? Just use another website.

Every website has a finite time in the sun, and RupertSpace is no exception. There will even be a day (soon?) when people say "Now what was that website called, TheirSpace or something?"

Who remembers AltaVista? It was as big as Google and RupertSpace in its day. Everyone thought it was the ultimate answer and unassailable when it "indexed the whole Internet". As altavista faded so will RupertSpace (and even Google eventually) and their restrictions on users will be irrelevant.

Thats just about everyone

[twakar]

As I see it, anyone who has ever written something.. ie an essay, a love letter, a dmca takedown notice, or someone who has taken a video, or a photo is automatically a copyright owner. Given that, I guess we'll have to see how this goes because we should all have access to this "Take Down, Stay Down" crap... never mind the legitimacy of the complaint.
Will there be some kind of registration for commercial copyright owners? This is how it looks to me:

• We're all copyright owners of some sort, so we all should have access
• No mechanism in place to determine the validity of the complaint, or even who the complainant is.
• Fair Use out the window again
• Too much possibility for white noise
• Infringement isn't the same from country to country, what maybe illegal in country, may be legal in another

I guess the new ISP monitoring tools in place from an earlier article will be able to trackdown rogue posters.
I've really had enough of this crap. Commercial copyright owners will never learn that any exposure, that is non-commercial, or motivated by profit is good for your content. Serve it up and people will pay (;|;)

Lemme get this straight...

[The Master Control P]

And to circumvent the filter, he added, a hacker would have to "screw up the content itself so it wasn't recognizable," to a degree where it wouldn't even be worth uploading in the first place.

AudibleMagic claims to have invented an algorithm that can recognize the same video in different forms better than the human brain can, across any format? That must mean the video is decoded into it's component frames before hashing, since that's how our brains get it. And better yet, this "Hash-Every-Frame" routine (which is apparently better than any other by leaps and bounds) will run on a site the size of MySpace without a BlueGene/L driving it? Uh-Huh. Say, NewsCorp, I've got this old bridge...

Hypothesis: AM's claim is bullshit.
Test: Everyone try uploading the same video, but add static and drop random frames from the start/end.
Outcomes: If hypothesis is true, AM and the Copyright Mafia look incredibly stupid. Again. If hypothesis is false, they handed us a free DDoS to push MySpace off the 'Net with by consuming all their processor time with hash checking.

Conclusion: Regardless of outcome, hackers win. Once again, DRM and everyone associated with it are Lolcows, unable to stop others from milking their stupidity for our amusement.

Re:Lemme get this straight...

[jbengt]

Audible Magic software is one of the tools used by the RIAA "expert" in that recent RIAA suit where the RIAA expert was knocked down:
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/28/20 2206:/
http://www.ilrweb.com/viewILRPDF.asp?filename=umg_ lindor_070223JacobsonDepositionTranscript:/
Nothing like relying on trade secrets and black box algorithms to make you sure that you're taking down the right files and leaving up the clean ones.

A lot of us are still waiting?

[Mathinker]

> As altavista faded so will ....

You are certainly correct, but ....

I'd guess that almost everyone on Slashdot is waiting for their personal vendetta objects to fade, be they Microsoft, Apple, the open source movement, Google, MySpace, the music industry cartel, the movie industry cartel, and a list of thousands more, including for some people (probably not mainstream Slashdotters) large organized nations and religions....

Much as I would like to fantasize to the contrary, even if you believe in future shock / technological singularity / etc. I don't see how it directly applies to the fading of organizations like MySpace or others listed above, considering that their existence and power have more to do with organizing or influencing people to act in a cooperative fashion than with the power of newer and newer technology.

It could (and probably will) take a lot longer than you think....

Re:The search for the Holy Grail

[Tuoqui]

Well if they are using MD5 SHA1 or SHA256 hashes for their 'digital fingerprinting' like they do for Computer Forensics dealing with files and/or entire drives.

All you would need to do to defeat their 'digital fingerprinting technology' would be to change a single bit in a file to something else then the odds of getting the same hash would be astronomical.

So yeah, I'm thinking its something along the lines of a publicity stunt by Myspace to look like they are actually doing something. Also they are required to obey the DMCA too which indicates that if someone issues a counter DMCA claim that they have to permit the content to be restored somehow and/or taken off of this 'blacklist'.

Learn from the past

[mattpointblank]

All I can say is: why won't people learn from history?

Almost 10 years ago now there was a little app some of you may remember called Napster. It offered mp3 downloads that, at the time, could take half an hour or more to complete. But it was worth it, because you couldn't get the music anywhere else (for free, anyway). Napster got closed down, but everyone just moved their collections over to Kazaa, Limewire, BearShare, etc etc. A few years later, the music industry catches up and realises that users are resilient and know what they want. This the iTunes Music Store (and its rivals) were born.

Now we're in a faster internet age, the same is happening with video. People want on-demand content. If someone tells me about a funny Colbert clip, I'm not going to check the TV guide for a repeat showing. I'll stick it into YouTube and watch it there. YouTube delete the Colbert clips? I'll watch it on DailyMation. Repeat ad infinitum.

Myspace can block out videos but people will find a way, and continue to find a way until the networks realise that in 2007, for the first time, the audience is starting to control the media.

Myspace's priorities

[British]

So they roll out this technology for the relatively unimportant issue of video piracy, yet they let the spambots roam free? Myspace's biggest problem, IMO is the gazillions of fake accounts being made every minute. It ruins the site. No, they are more interested in video piracy, jeesh.