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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.
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.
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.