YouTube Video-Fingerprinting Due in September

Tech.Luver writes "The Register is reporting on Google's statement to a presiding judge that video-fingerprinting of YouTube material will be ready in September. The development is required to head off a three-headed suit against the company, currently being debated in a New York City courthouse. The system will, according to Google, 'be as sophisticated as fingerprinting technology used by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.' From the article: 'As Google told El Reg in an earlier conversation, the company already has two systems in place for policing infringing content - but neither are ideal. One system allows copyright holders to notify Google when they spot their videos on the company's sites. When notified, the company removes the offending videos, in compliance with the American Digital Millennium Copyright Act. A second system uses "hash" technology to automatically block repeated uploads of infringing material.'"

Comments

Hard AI ftw

[UbuntuDupe]

Earlier I had joked about Google's claim to be nearing a system that lets them check for copyrighted works. I said that they're basically claiming to have solved a hard AI problem.

Others pointed out that, no, it's not a hard AI problem to just compare some kind of checksum of the video against a set of banned checksums. That's true. But what about once people know they're using this system? They can just trivially re-encode. Perhaps add a scene break here or there, and totally mess up the fingerprint. To prevent that, it seems, you would need to solve a hard-AI problem: that is, be able to determine if an arbitrarily-encoded video appears to a human to match some copyrighted work. It would have to be robust against minor scene shortenings and lengthenings, scene breakups, color gradients laid over the video, etc.

Anyone know how difficult this program is to circumvent? (Just hypothetically -- not advocating criminal activity here.)

Re:Hard AI ftw

[Udderdude]

They could potentially scan the entire movie for a few keyframes that they know will be in there reguardless of silly scene breaks, etc.

Nobody would know what the keyframes are, so it would be hard/impossible to black out that specific frame.

Re:Hard AI ftw

[sholden]

So I guess it doesn't matter if it then blocks a video which has taken a couple of seconds of video from a TV show in a "Review of Episode X" video post, and just happens to grab one of those keyframes?

Of course a little bit of coding and you have a program that takes that 10 minute video, splits it into 10 1 minute videos and uploads them. The ones that got rejected it splits into 10 6 seconds videos and uploads them. Rinse and repeat until you have however small an set of rejections you asked it for. Then it cuts out just the necessary fragments of videos (replacing them with the last good frame or something?).

Of course that can be worked at google's end by adding a delay to the report rejection step, and by banning those who get lots of rejects.

Re:Hard AI ftw

[DDLKermit007]

Sorry, but fingerprinting the video is damn near impossible. Closest any image recogniton app can go is similar scene right now. Some can do logos, but were talking low resolution videos. Pretty much they'll do a file checksum, and that'll kill most reuploads. For the determined. All that'll be needed is a simple re-encode. That'll completely change any checksums involved. They won't seriously spend that much machine time on checking if they are allowed to make money off a video. They'll do just enough to say they did something, but not so much you can't find a way around it.

Two-part Protection

[RancidPickle]

One part is the same -- someone spots "their" video, they take it down immediately to avoid getting sued under the DCMA. Expect the takedown notices to continue, which will still kill parody videos, fair-use compliant videos, and videos that are legal, but someone sends bogus takedown notices, such as the ones that Viacom "accidently" included in their original request.

The second part sounds more promising, but someone may be able to get around hashing the videos, such as inserting random one-frame images, as in the Fight Club movie, or adding in overlay text, or possibly adding in effects. If they try to hash a few selected time slices, someone will figure it out eventually. As with all digital protection, this just pushes off the inevitable. At least it will make Google look good in court, since they're attempting to comply with Viacom and the other copyright holder's requests for not posting their material.

In the end, it won't count for much. It would make more sense to add in additional protections for false or malicious takedown notices, such as adding in a $50K fine for false claims. This would at least make the big companies scrutinize the videos that they're issuing a takedown notice for.

'infringement'

[SCHecklerX]

Same as with music. If people are going to buy it, they will. Just charge a fair price. Use youtube as advertisement for commercial interests (daily show, colbert report, robot chicken, anyone?)

But youtube is a little different in that many of the things people go there for are unique or one-time things that the only way you'll ever get a chance to see them again is if you recorded it yourself, or somebody else does and you are lucky enough to find it online.

The biggest issue I have is stuff that you'll NEVER BE ABLE TO ACTUALLY BUY OR SEE AGAIN being taken down. My favorite example is prince performing at half time for the superbowl. Now, not only are the videos gone from youtube, but also all of the comments (which IMHO are equally as valuable to the community) about the videos.

Taking things like this down erodes our culture and destroys valuable records of what has gone on in our lives.

Re:separation of the web

[radish]

You think? Here's a history lesson. The generation currently in power were all pot-smoking hippies back in the 60's and 70's, but anti-drug laws just keep on getting stronger. Teenagers and 20-somethings have always had this wacky belief that they are heralding a new way of thinking, and eventually when all the old gas-bags die we'll have a utopia. Somehow it never seems to happen.