YouTube Filtering Is On-Line

ghostcorps writes "After months of promises to IP-holders, the long-awaited filters system for YouTube has gone online. The new system will make it easier, the company claims, for copyrighted clips to be removed. 'YouTube now needs the cooperation of copyright owners for its filtering system to work, because the technology requires copyright holders to provide copies of the video they want to protect so YouTube can compare those digital files to material being uploaded to its website. This means that movie and TV studios will have to provide decades of copyright material if they don't want it to appear on YouTube, or spend even more time scanning the site for violations.'"

Comments

perks of the job

[LiquidCoooled]

a few weeks ago the poll was what perks do google get, well now we know:

unlimited copyright tape library.

Sergey and Larry must have a lot of popcorn.

Re:perks of the job

[feed_me_cereal]

beyond that, I wonder what the long term plans of a company whose mission is to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" when it comes to this data... Perhaps initially some mining applications?

Re:perks of the job

[utopianfiat]

I'm sorry, is it just me, or does Australia have different rules of grammar and punctuation that allows them to print a sentence like this?

It's still too early to tell how YouTube's new filtering system will affect the seven-month-old Viacom suit, said Mike Fricklas, Viacom's general counsel. "We are delighted that Google appears to be stepping up to its responsibility and end the practice of infringement," he said.

Quotes around Fricklas's first statement? "Google appears to be stepping and end" rather than "Google appears to be stepping and ending"?
The article looks like it was written by a damn five-year-old.

In before joke about convicts.

Re:perks of the job

[Scratch-O-Matic]

Well, the first part is an indirect quote, so it requires no quotation marks. The second part IS a direct quote, so you can't blame the 5-year-old author.

Re:perks of the job

[madsenj37]

You got me thinking about that. If Google were to mark the videos they use with copyright dates, the videos given to them by copyright holders, they could effectively know when the copyright ends on a particular work. This would allow them to then upload a video the day the copyright ends, thus having easy access to once copyrighted stuff. Google could future proof itself and have free information to make available to the public first.

Re:perks of the job

[*weasel]

Nice to know Google has a 95-year plan.

Re:perks of the job

[Anonymous Coward]

Er, yes, if Google of today was so confident that it would still be there one century from now (and somehow that there business model didn't change in that century).

Thanks to extensive lobbying by publishers and media conglomerates, works created by individuals last some obscene amount of years after the author's death (not the date of creation), and works copyrighted by corporations last again some obscene amount of years. Most stuffs that are in public domain now were created either before 20th century or very early 20th century.

Re:perks of the job

[Anonymous Coward]

Too bad copyright is effectively perpetual.

It's A Shame They Won't Take the Offer

[eldavojohn]

What I found most interesting comes from the beta announcment:

Copyright holders can choose what they want done with their videos: whether to block, promote, or even--if a copyright holder chooses to partner with us--create revenue from them, with minimal friction. YouTube Video ID will help carry out that choice. Because I'm certain Google realizes that a lot of these copyright holders are sittin' on a freaking gold mine here.

I guess that's the sad thing though, it's no longer the people that made this stuff that own the copyrights. It's huge corporations. This goes for sound and video. Do you think any of the big studios care about artist exposure? They don't care about building a fan base, they care about profit margins.

I personally would like to see Google help users approach and push the limits of fair use of sound and video. I think that a lot of artists would be open to their work being displayed in a tasteful manner without the full work being put online. I also think that the usually low quality of YouTube is a good reason to allow this and that if copyright material is found, they should investigate either shortening it or degrading the quality so that viewers get a taste. What's more, putting a link to sales of the item would be basically free advertising.

I feel especially sorry for the people who build movie montages with unpopular songs for I have watched many of them and purchased a DVD & CD from seeing the two. After watching that particular video, I rediscovered the genius of Sergio Leone after a fan posted that video with one of my favorite bands, The Arcade Fire. Sure, it's just anecdotal evidence but I still view that as original art & innovative.

It's truly a shame that copyright holders are throwing away what could be a beautiful & profitable relationship with fans.

Re:It's A Shame They Won't Take the Offer

[Luke Dawson]

Because I'm certain Google realizes that a lot of these copyright holders are sittin' on a freaking gold mine here.

Yes, but now those copyright holders cannot argue that Google isn't trying its damnedest to curb copyright infringement. I mean, how much more can they reasonably be expected to do? They comply with DMCA takedown notices, and some could say by implementing this filter, if anything they're going above and beyond their obligations.

Re:It's A Shame They Won't Take the Offer

[blueZhift]

I agree and suspect that many copyright owners will just blindly demand that everything be blocked that uses any of their content because that's the easiest thing to do. As someone who enjoys making anime music videos, I can only wonder how things are going to shake out. If the things I make are just summarily blocked, I'll probably stop using YouTube altogether. I should note that I've bought more than a few songs after watching user created music videos that featured them. In each case, I would never have heard of the song any other way.

Re:It's A Shame They Won't Take the Offer

[Oligonicella]

I guess that's the sad thing though, it's no longer the people that made this stuff that own the copyrights.

And, you're talking right out your butt. Whoever owns the copyright, owns the copyright. If someone sells it or leases it, that's their choice. If a company pays someone to produce something, that 'artist' does not own the copyright, the company does.

This goes for sound and video.

Not, however, in the absolute sense you portray. Burton Cummings, for instance, holds his own copyrights. Hmmm. Seems artists can control their own work if they wish to.

I think that a lot of artists would be open to their work being displayed in a tasteful manner without the full work being put online.

Some would, some wouldn't. Those who don't want to have the right to not have their work ripped off.

Re:It's A Shame They Won't Take the Offer

[utopianfiat]

Don't be so sure.

"It's still too early to tell how YouTube's new filtering system will affect the seven-month-old Viacom suit", said Mike Fricklas, Viacom's general counsel. "We are delighted that Google appears to be stepping up to its responsibility and end the practice of infringement," he said.

*sound of cash register ringing* Who wants to sing the corporate greed song with me?

Re:It's A Shame They Won't Take the Offer

[aplusjimages]

Maybe with the possible Writers Guild strike, there will be a new movie and TV industry that emerges that will be more digital friendly.

Re:It's A Shame They Won't Take the Offer

[meetmeonaholiday]

Unfortunately, what congress and the courts don't seem to understand is that the sale of copyrights is unconstitutional:

Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8:

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

• "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts,"
• "by securing for limited Times"
• "to Authors and Inventors"
• "the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."

What about that is so hard to understand? The writers of the U.S. Constitution granted the right to "Authors and Inventors", not patent trolls or recording companies. Granted, "limited time" is debatable as far as how to best promote progress, but the right being granted exclusively to the content creator is pretty clear.

Re:It's A Shame They Won't Take the Offer

[RobertM1968]

I personally would like to see Google help users approach and push the limits of fair use of sound and video. I think that a lot of artists would be open to their work being displayed in a tasteful manner without the full work being put online. I also think that the usually low quality of YouTube is a good reason to allow this and that if copyright material is found, they should investigate either shortening it or degrading the quality so that viewers get a taste. What's more, putting a link to sales of the item would be basically free advertising.

Your idea/sentiment is a good one. The problem I see is that many users are already pushing the "fair use" doctrine, when their first post, that MAY fit under fair use - has that fair use claim invalidated by the second and third and tenth video segment that they upload (which in total complete the movie or tv show). It would also make it very difficult for Google to determine fair use without a lot more additional work - "yeah, THIS video clip may fit fair use, but now I have to make sure the person didnt release part 2-10 under this account or another... and make sure no one else continued where they left off"

There has to be an acceptable middle ground... the content owners (well, the big corporate ones) are unlikely to look for one, especially when they are (futilely) trying to establish their own business model in that respect (with no clue how to do so). Working out an ad revenue deal (with Google) would probably be easier than setting up their own infrastructure, as many have noted - but it also loses them a level of control - and a portion of the profits that would have exclusively been theres.

Well, I'll stop here... because though I see the problems, I dont have a solution (at least not one I think either side will listen to).

Re:It's A Shame They Won't Take the Offer

[Anonymous Coward]

The sale of copyrights is unconstitutional? You seem to be misunderstanding the meaning of the word "exclusive" in the clause. In the context of the clause, exclusive simply means that the authors and inventors have the initial rights to their "writings and discoveries" over all others. In no way, does this mean that the authors and inventors are precluded from voluntarily selling or contracting away their rights to others, such as to "patent trolls" or "record companies." The only significance of the word "exclusive" in the section is as a default rule -- authors and inventors start off with the full and unchallengeable rights to their writings and discoveries. What they do with those rights is up to them.

If the sale / transfer of copyrights were unconstitutional, there would be a MASSIVE chilling effect on "the progress of science and useful arts" since every single author / inventor would be forced to become a salesman / entrepreneur in order to making a living off his/her writings and inventions. In terms of efficiency, this would be diasasterous -- authors and inventors aren't necessary good at (and shouldn't be forced to waste their time) setting up their own businesses in order to sell their creative products. Some might want to and have the talent, but there would be an overall decline in productivity -- their time simply is better spent on their "writings and discoveries" just the average businessman's time is more efficiently spent negotiating contracts for artists than by trying to create music of his own.

That having been said, your much better argument is the "limited times" one. The fact that Congress has continually extended copyrights is arguably a perversion of the Framer's intent that they be limited in nature. There's no principled reason that the definition of "limited time" is longer now than it was when the Constitution was ratified. I definitely agree that Disney's incessant lobbying should not be the determining factor on the proper length of copyrights as it has been in the past.

Re:It's A Shame They Won't Take the Offer

[HTH NE1]

Those that can own copyrights can still license those rights to others to do their publication. The GP was saying that transfer of those copyrights away from the author permanently to another are what is unconstitutional.

Similarly, with such a strict interpretation, a licensee of a copyright cannot sue for infringement. Only the actual author could do that. But he can still enlist the aid of an association to aid in his defense of his copyrights.

Further, due to the limitation of only the author being able to bring suit, it sets an upper limit to the "limited times", restricting it to the author's lifetime.

In the case of multiple authorship, and especially co-corporate authorship (employee creates work at the behest of his employer, allowing the corporation to become an author) the lifetime of the most mortal author should be the deciding factor for duration (the employee(s)), and no immortal entity should be a sole author with copyright protection.

IANAL

Re:It's A Shame They Won't Take the Offer

[Stray7Xi]

Yes it may be a goldmine for copyright holders but what about individual copyright holders. If I upload a legitimate video and it gets a million hits, do I have the option to flag it as my video and get a cut of profits?

Do they even notify the poster that someone has claimed copyright? Whats stopping me from claiming copyrights on some other individuals video and asking for a piece of profits. I'm curious what kind of hoops someone has to go through to verify they are the copyright owner? If its to hard they my find themselves opened up to lawsuits from individual copyright holders under the premise of they do content filtering for NBC but they don't do filtering for Joe Blow's video.

Re:It's A Shame They Won't Take the Offer

[Kalriath]

Unfortunately, what congress and the courts don't seem to understand is that the sale of copyrights is unconstitutional Excellent. Tell the FSF that, since they require copyright assignment on all GNU application (those specifically managed by them directly I mean, not anything under GPL). Are you trying to encourage people to sabotage the GNU userland?

This could make an interesting discussion actually... but it'll probably get modded Flamebait instead.

Re:It's A Shame They Won't Take the Offer

[TechForensics]

And YouTube's eclecticism, the thing that made it so great, is already gone. Last week, a search for "Beatles Ed Sullivan" yielded a dozen clips of their first US appearances. Now there's nothing, just junk. Thanks, corporate America, for locking up our culture again.

Re:It's A Shame They Won't Take the Offer

[KDR_11k]

This raises the question if authors or inventors can only be natural persons or if a corporation can be considered the author/inventor of a work.

Almost brilliant

[Anonymous Coward]

They devised a system that's so onerous to the content owners that nobody is likely to follow through, and it allows Google to go to court or PR appearances and tout having a new system in place that would work great if the owners would just use it.

Re:Almost brilliant

[Shark]

They should put some fine print that says google is allowed to use the uploaded sample content however it sees fit, including distributing it freely ;)

Re:Almost brilliant

[timmarhy]

how the fuck else do you suggest they do it? defending copyrights has ALWAYS been up to the holder, not the rest of us.

Re:Almost brilliant

[tomcatuk]

I think you'll find copyright holders are far too busy posting broken torrents to piratebay. They simply don't have time to trawl youtube as well surely.

Re:Almost brilliant

[megaditto]

Those shameless, shameless copyright holders stealing those torrents from you!!1!!11

Yay

[somersault]

One step down the path for Google to catalog every movie ever made, and provide live streaming of any movie you want direct to your home!

Re:Yay

[jollyreaper]

One step down the path for Google to catalog every movie ever made, and provide live streaming of any movie you want direct to your home! And just imagine if the individual videos were searchable.

SELECT boobies FROM "80's teen movies"

Re:Yay

[somersault]

WHERE Size >= ?

;)

Re:Yay

[LiquidCoooled]

AND Count=2 and Gender='F'

bit more specificaction

Re:Yay

[neveragain4181]

INNER JOIN?

!

Re:Yay

[Anonymous Coward]

Now, how can YouTube users access these (presumably full-length and good-quality) videos provided by copyright owners? Yes YouTube, we can help you identify rogue videos.

Re:Yay

[caluml]

boobies ------- 2 2 2 2 2 2 6 row(s) returned

Re:Yay

[Socguy]

Absolutely, This is a brilliant scheme by Google. All it takes is one change of copyright law and Google is sitting on a library of all the content that copyright holders have uploaded to it! Heck, they don't even have to digitize it, the copyright holder does it for them!

Re:Yay

[somersault]

As long as it's not BUSHY

How easy is circumvention?

[AmIAnAi]

Presumably they are creating fingerprints from the original material and comparing those against uploads. It would be interesting to know how well this copes with different codecs and frame rate changes.

Or do they wait for the uploads to be flagged as infringing and then do a dumb binary compare to prevent deleted files being uploaded again.

Re:How easy is circumvention?

[krilid]

From an efficiency standpoint, having the copyright owner submit the material to a centralized location for fingerprinting seems odd. Distributing the fingerprinting mechanism and having content owners create the (presumably more compact) fingerprints themselves would make sense. Of course, publicizing the fingerprinting mechanism would make it easier for those designing circumvention tech.

Re:How easy is circumvention?

[imgod2u]

Wavelet approximation does a pretty good job of being independent of framerate. Codecs just need to be decoded into raw information, and then analyzed. Hell, a simple FFT of the video, normalized to a certain framerate, would also do a bang-up job of filtering out 99% of the videos that don't match. The staggering amount of processing power required for this though, is surprising. Either Google has some monstrous server farm somewhere, or they're counting on content "owners" not using this utility too much that their processing queue becomes backed up.

Remember that it's not just the initial analysis/data extraction to some form of meta-data representation (eigenvectors or wavelet data) that has to be performed. Every subsequent video submission by every teenager out there has to be run through the same video analysis process and then compared to the entire library.

Re:How easy is circumvention?

[Tim C]

The staggering amount of processing power required for this though, is surprising. Either Google has some monstrous server farm somewhere

Surely that's a given though - this is Google we're talking about. How many web pages does their search engine index, and how quickly are the results of a search returned?

I appreciate that they're not the same problem, but YouTube must involve a large number of servers which are relatively doing very little beyond grabbing content and streaming it out. They currently need gobs of bandwidth, and probably have gobs of processing power sat around more or less idle as a result.

Re:How easy is circumvention?

[deviceb]

"It would be interesting to know how well this copes with different codecs and frame rate changes."
or how about something like the clearpixil.gif? A watermark, floating logo or similar should break whatever fingerprint they are looking for i would think.
Whatever though... i hope google gets all there content!

Re:How easy is circumvention?

[Anonymous Coward]

FYI: Bandwith is cheep.

Re:How easy is circumvention?

[u38cg]

If it were me, I would issue the copyright owners a tool to generate a signature and get them to upload that. As for uploaders, they already convert the video clip anyway, so checking a few random frames against a bloom filter or something shouln't be too onerous.

Re:How easy is circumvention?

[gad_zuki!]

Why should it work well at all? This is the wolf guarding the henhouse. If google truly removed all copyrighted items from youtube then youtube would collapse. It would be only home videos, cat montages, and vlogs. The only reason I have ever visited youtube is to watch copyrighted stuff I couldnt find anywhere else.

Re:How easy is circumvention?

[Anonymous Coward]

Either Google has some monstrous server farm somewhere...

Yes, yes they do. In fact, it might be more accurate to say that Google is a monstrous server farm. Only it's not somewhere, it's everywhere -- distributed sytems across datacenters anywhere the power's cheap. That's the scary thing about Google. They have way too many way too smart people with way too many resources for anyone's good.

Re:How easy is circumvention?

[12357bd]

Presumably they are creating fingerprints from the original material and comparing those against uploads.

No need of fingerprints it's better to compare full video image directly. We are comparing a 25 fps video stream against a 40h video pool at real time speed on a comodity pc.

Don't know how Google is doing the detection, but the technology to make it possible has already been here for some time, see the iMMem site for information about the still image comparison technology being used in our video search programs.

Re:How easy is circumvention?

[LiquidFire_HK]

If it were me, I would issue the copyright owners a tool to generate a signature and get them to upload that. But then your enemies could generate a signature of your own video you uploaded and pretend to be the copyright holders so they can take it down (or steal your revenue).

Re:How easy is circumvention?

[RulerOf]

Either Google has some monstrous server farm somewhere,

Ahahahahaha. HAHAHA.

Do you realize that you just suggested that Google doesn't have a MONSTROUS server farm?

You're funny.

Re:How easy is circumvention?

[imgod2u]

I should have clarified. I used the term monstrous for the purpose of indicating that it's beyond practicality. That is, normalize whatever Google currently has now (for its search engines) as "normal" and imagine a cluster that is "monstrous" compared to that.

The actual decoding and meta-data extraction from each uploaded video may not take much but matching signatures within the entire database of content (including matching it to sublengths of different content to catch the 30-seconds-of-a-2-hour-movie cases) would require astronomical computational abilities.

Re:How easy is circumvention?

[12357bd]

The actual decoding and meta-data extraction from each uploaded video may not take much but matching signatures within the entire database of content (including matching it to sublengths of different content to catch the 30-seconds-of-a-2-hour-movie cases) would require astronomical computational abilities.

Well, once the 'signatures' have been computed, we (not Google) are searching the contents of a 2 hours video (with parts as little as 4 secs) vs an 68h video pool in 300 seconds, and if the math is correct we expect to doit in less than 30 seconds really soon, using a 'normal' pc, without hardware optimizations.

Brute force would need an astronomical number of computations, but a proper mathematical understanding of the problem can result in a really efficient image comparison system.

Remember folks

[Anonymous Coward]

Fair use is only a defense to the use of copyrighted material. It is not a right you can assert.

Re:Remember folks

[poetmatt]

Wow, shills come early today! Someone mark the parent -1 already to save us some time...apparently they've never looked on wikipedia either. Wikipedia states: "An affirmative defense is simply a term of art from litigation reflecting the timing in which the defense is raised. It does not distinguish between "rights" and "defenses," and so it does not characterize the substance of the defendant's actions as "not a right but a defense."

One day, the trolls will evolve. They will stab themselves in the throats, and society will steal their shoes as gratitude. Too bad it took me 5 seconds longer to post the reply than it took the troll to make it.

Re:Remember folks

[imgod2u]

It's actually the other way around. Copyright law and copyright enforcement have to be justified. The inherent right of "fair use" falls under the 1st amendment that protects free speech (and subsequent expression in any form, including giving a disc you burned to your buddy). Any restriction on said ability must be justified through a court case and is granted Constitutional validity by Article I, section 8:

"To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries"

Re:Remember folks

[Hatta]

As if there's a difference.

copyright holders aren't going to provide anything

[alen]

copyright holders aren't going to provide decades of anything since it's up to google to keep copyrighted content off youtube. no reason why a copyright holder needs to go through this when someone else is infringing on their rights

Re:copyright holders aren't going to provide anyth

[Tim C]

But it's the copyright holder's responsibility to notify Google that the infringement is taking place. Google is under no legal obligation to screen everything.

But what choice did they have?

[TechnoBunny]

There's no other way to automagically scan all submitted videos and decide whether they are copyrighted or not. Only by having a set of material thats deemd 'copyrighted' to compare against can a given clip be tagged as legal or not.

It seems like the best solution to a practically impossible problem.

Re:But what choice did they have?

[BlowHole666]

So it is like that machine that finds the Golden Ticket in the Wonka bars. It just beeps and spits out a sheet of paper that ask "What would I do with a lifetime supply of chocolate?". But under the hood we all know it is just a midget in a tin can feeding a sheet of paper on cue.

Re:But what choice did they have?

[aadvancedGIR]

The best solution for the copyright owner, maybe but:
-Why can't any weasely person or corp download anything and submit it as their own property. I believe it will be restricted to large media corps to avoid most abuses or else it will become a mess like the patent systems where anyone can submit someone else's product without much checking.
-How could an automatic system tell appart illegal use of copyrighted material and legal one such as parody?

Re:But what choice did they have?

[vil3nr0b]

I would have kept the business model the same. I would have acted like I was really taking down copyrighted material, all the while having a twenty percent success rate against unlicensed material. BTW, just take down the new Britney vids, etc. because noone cares about Stevie Wonder on Sesame Street singing, "Superstitious". That way you appease record companies, etc. and still don't piss off the customers who click on the ads to support you.

Circumvention Ideas

[CheeseburgerBrown]

1. A filter that shifts 70% of pixels one pixel to the left.

2. A filter that munges the rows of pixels around the frame area, distorting the video fingerprint without affecting viewing quality.

3. A filter that randomly inserts the Goatse man for a Fight Club-like single frame.

4. A utility that uploads the clip backwards, and then a browser-player that automatically time-remaps it forward for playback.

5. A watermarking process designed to distort the video fingerprint while remaining invisible to non-AI viewers.

Okay now -- code it.

Re:Circumvention Ideas

[ZorbaTHut]

I've actually written a video comparison utility, and it would have neatly ignored every single one of these (with the exception of "backwards", which would have taken about five more minutes of work - it wasn't really important in my case.) Video is an interesting case because it's already so damaged by the very nature of compression, your tester has to be very lax to catch anything - but on the other hand, there's so much data that it's easier than you'd think to match up. Especially if you're willing to toss borderline cases at human checkers - you honestly end up with surprisingly few of those.

I don't know what Google is doing along these lines, though.

Re:Circumvention Ideas

[GrievousMistake]

Those wouldn't even fool image fingerprinting technology from the 80's.
If the people that made this had their hearts in it, and if they were willing to allow some small amount of false positives, I'd assume that there's no way to trick it without also significally inconviencing human viewers.

Re:Circumvention Ideas

[Jarjarthejedi]

How about subtly shifting each pixel one pixel in a random direction (ensuring that they all end up heading in the same direction for any particular frame) and then making each pixel a slightly different color shade, you'd have to accept a good number of false positives to be able to catch videos in a different location with different colors than the original.

Re:Circumvention Ideas

[TheGreatHegemon]

Or just use another online video service - far easier than circumventing this stuff.

Re:Circumvention Ideas

[Applekid]

Yes, but given the quality of the previous fingerprinting, all those tricks are likely to work.

One video my, er, friend was uploading (that's my story and I'm sticking to it) was removed from youtube. He tried uploading it again and it didn't even go up, it was just immediately rejected. Out comes the hex editor and he changed the last byte to something else and reuploaded. It worked like a peach, like they were just doing checksums on the upload. *rollseyes*

For how long their fingerprinting has been in the making, one can only hope it's as functional as your comparison utility.

Add my vote for:
a1) chroma-shifting during encode
a2) video rotated 180 degrees, to be corrected with nvidia's nview "rotate monitor"
a3) odd, non-standard framerates (27 fps, etc)

Re:Circumvention Ideas

[PeterBrett]

How about subtly shifting each pixel one pixel in a random direction (ensuring that they all end up heading in the same direction for any particular frame) and then making each pixel a slightly different color shade, you'd have to accept a good number of false positives to be able to catch videos in a different location with different colors than the original.

Dead easy to spot. Ever heard of sift descriptors? They're fast to compute, and you only need one or two per frame to be able to uniquely fingerprint a video in a way that's totally resistant to rotation, recolouring, frame rate changes, and most of the other (lame) circumvention techniques suggested in this discussion.

Re:Circumvention Ideas

[12357bd]

Yes, I am also working on big scale image comparison (video is a perfect case) and your points are valid (even backward/rotated images are easily detected), the only question is how fast do you detect a video (or part of) duplicate?

Re:Circumvention Ideas

[Clandestine_Blaze]

Or just use another online video service - far easier than circumventing this stuff. And that is precisely what Google should be worried about. If the "IP-holders" had their way, the only videos that would populate Youtube would be home videos of people acting insanely stupid. The population of viewers would drop significantly over time. Not to say that EVERYONE only goes to Youtube for viewing copyrighted material, but I can imagine people using other services to find their favorite band's music video or clips from one of their favorite movies if everything were to be filtered out.

Perhaps I'm not correctly grasping the concept here, but to me, less viewers means less ad hits. Less ad hits means less revenue stream for Youtube / Google. Yet, Google HAS to oblige by copyright holders when requested to, so they have absolutely no choice in this matter.

Re:Circumvention Ideas

[Animaether]

a1) ignore chroma data (gets compressed more anyway), or compare relative (rather than absolute) values - done
a2) to fall in line with 'use custom player to ungarble garbled content'; users don't want to have to jump through hoops to play back videos. Btw, are you going to rotate the audio, too? - done
a3) base your fingerprint on the realtime performance, not on exact frames. Use a margin of, say, +-5%. Anything over that will result in a 'garbled' up video again anyway.

In essence it comes down to this... if you take any decent fingerprinting software, then the only reasonable way to get around them is by garbling the video; at which point people don't want to watch it anymore, or would have to jump through hoops to get a special player to ungarble. 'Mission accomplished' for the content copyright holders.

It's funny that anytime this sort of thing pops up, most people are heavily debating how to defeat the system, rather than worrying about their own original content (or parody content/etc.) getting falsely flagged.

Re:Circumvention Ideas

[LingNoi]

Yes, wasn't the pirate bay suppose to be opening a video sharing website? What happened to that idea?

Re:Circumvention Ideas

[Anonymous Coward]

Michel Gondry has already come up with a solution.

Re:Circumvention Ideas

[SnprBoB86]

If I were writing a system to detect copyrighted movies being uploaded, one approach I would use would be the following:

1) Scan IMDB for a list of actors
2) Spider the web for photos of those actors and learn their faces
3) Match the titles of the uploaded video to movies in IMDB
4) Scan the movie for faces and match them to actors
5) If the actor set mostly matches the credits on IMDB, chances are that it's that movie or show
6) Determine some formula to interpret the previous data to make a call:
      A) Not enough matches to warrent any action
      B) Obviously fair use, leave up, but send to owner for review w/ low priority
      C) Potentially copyright infringement, leave up (or maybe take down) and send to owner for review
      D) Obviously copyright infringement, take down and simply send notice to owner

Re:Circumvention Ideas

[Anonymous Coward]

Seeing as you haven't got a clue about image processing, fingerprinting, watermarking, algorithm design or programming in general, the chances of you being put in charge of writing such a system seem remote at best.

Re:Circumvention Ideas

[ZorbaTHut]

Honestly, I never got to the point of optimization. And it obviously would depend heavily on the number of computers dedicated to it - I was making sure it was easily parallelizable.

I don't really know how slow it would have been, it would have been fast enough for the project specs but I wasn't designing it specifically for something like this :)

How does it work?

[BlowHole666]

How exactly will this work? Do the copy write holders upload their files and google analyzes them and compares them to uploaded files by its user base? If an uploaded file meets a specific threshold does it remove the file? What about parts of a show? If Fox uploads a 30 min episode of Family Guy and someone uploads a 5 min clip how is that handled. Also I thought you could use up to 30 seconds of a video/commercial/show etc. with out getting in trouble or does that just apply to educational use?

Re:How does it work?

[jollyreaper]

Also I thought you could use up to 30 seconds of a video/commercial/show etc. with out getting in trouble or does that just apply to educational use?/quote>

Hey, that uploaded family guy episode, I'm only using 30 second clips from it. I just happen to be using them sequentially in the same video. Hey, if sampling's a crime, go after the rappers first!

Re:How does it work?

[John Hasler]

> Also I thought you could use up to 30 seconds of a video/commercial/show etc. with out
> getting in trouble or does that just apply to educational use?

Google "fair use". There is no specific threshold. Under some circumstance you can use the entire work. Under others 30 seconds would infringe.

Rubbish

[suv4x4]

Copyright owners don't need to provide "decades of copyrighted material".

The system will help with reuploads. This means, when a video is marked as pirated, the system will be able to recognize the duplicates and mark them for removal.

This means companies don't need to track the duplicates manually any more but just point to a single sample.

Re:Rubbish

[AlexBirch]

Depends if you want to prevent or just constantly search for infringement.
If I were at a major corporation, I would hire an intern for this.

Re:Rubbish

[suv4x4]

Depends if you want to prevent or just constantly search for infringement.
If I were at a major corporation, I would hire an intern for this.

I think in one of the cases where content was down despite it being fair use, the company in question fired some intern in charge of marking the video.

So I guess they already do that :)

Thin cover?

[s4m7]

Given varying levels of capture quality and compression, I think this is always going to be a sticky situation. I wonder if the filtering technology can identify partial clips of a copyrighted work and flag those as well.

My real curiosity though, is if Google/YouTube might be trying to build a huge searchable library of video media, as they already did with the books project, and this is a way to sort of lure the content providers in. I'd love to see what kind of license the content providers are extending to Youtube in providing this material.

Re:Thin cover?

[Rob T Firefly]

I wonder if the filtering technology can identify partial clips of a copyrighted work and flag those as well. This is a good point, and another can of worms. What if I make something that includes a short, fair-use-protected clip of someone else's content? Will those perfectly legal frames get me automatically zapped as an infringer?

Can we get the HAHAHAHA tag now

[zappepcs]

Google finds a way that is only minimally less painful for the **AA to protect their copywrited works, and in turn gets original copies of all of them. I just know this made the **AA truly happy.

Cuban said anyone that bought youtube was a fool, wonder what he thinks about this move?

It sounds to me like the **AA will be hiring in their IT departments soon.. anyone need a job?

Re:Can we get the HAHAHAHA tag now

[Bucc5062]

You mean work for Lord Sauron in Mordor as a minion? No thanks! I have a video clip I'd love to show you of what happens to those who work for the dark Lord. Alas, it got blocked so all I can tell you is...it aint pretty.

Opt Out!?

[monk.e.boy]

God I hate opt out. Imagine you produce films and TV, then google suddenly says "Yeah, it's all on YouTube by default. But you can opt out using this huge complex time consuming method."

Is this evil?

I mean, isn't anything where you get spammed by default even if there is an opt out option, evil? I know this isn't spam, but it must be pretty annoying for some people (like the BBC who I help fund through my TV license.)

Re:Opt Out!?

[LiquidCoooled]

Actually, its already opt-in.

I have to opt-in to create an account to upload stuff.
I have to confirm I have licenses for the data I am uploaded (it is mentioned in the T&Cs of your youtube account).

If there is something wrong the copyright holder should go after the uploader not the site.

B. You shall be solely responsible for your own User Submissions and the consequences of posting or publishing them. In connection with User Submissions, you affirm, represent, and/or warrant that: you own or have the necessary licenses, rights, consents, and permissions to use and authorize YouTube to use all patent, trademark, trade secret, copyright or other proprietary rights in and to any and all User Submissions to enable inclusion and use of the User Submissions in the manner contemplated by the Website and these Terms of Service.

http://youtube.com/t/terms

Re:Opt Out!?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, since copyright law itself is evil, making it as awkward as possible to opt-out of sharing is lessening the evil while staying within the law.
http://questioncopyright.org/

Re:Opt Out!?

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean, isn't anything where you get spammed by default even if there is an opt out option, evil? Sadly that is the way the snail mail ads are in my country. You have to tell the national post service that you do not want to receive ads anymore, and put a special sticker ("Ordered mail only") on your mailbox. Otherwise you get the default daily load of ads.

Re:Opt Out!?

[RobertM1968]

Not just that, but it is going beyond what the DMCA is requiring (by making the takedown request method easier than required).

There are additional implications (as recently reported on /.) which I think will be worsened by this... for instance, a Viacom or an RIAA "clicking" takedown requests on a lot more content (that isnt theirs) now that it is much easier to do so. This is already a growing problem - I predict it will just worsen now that it is even easier for them.

Re:Opt Out!?

[asuffield]

If there is something wrong the copyright holder should go after the uploader not the site.

The T&C is a contract between the site and the uploader, so the normal way for the US courts to process this is:

Whiner files suit against the site. The site produces their records showing that the uploader agreed to this stuff. The whiner files a motion to extend the suit to include the uploader; the judge accepts it. The site files a motion of dismissal on the grounds that they've done their part; the claims against the site are dismissed, and the suit continues against the uploader.

Yes, this is very roundabout, inefficient, and involves a lot of extra billable hours for lawyers. Lawyers love that kind of stuff.

Re:Opt Out!?

[VGPowerlord]

If there is something wrong the copyright holder should go after the uploader not the site.

The T&C is a contract between the site and the uploader, so the normal way for the US courts to process this is:

Whiner files suit against the site. The site produces their records showing that the uploader agreed to this stuff. The whiner files a motion to extend the suit to include the uploader; the judge accepts it. The site files a motion of dismissal on the grounds that they've done their part; the claims against the site are dismissed, and the suit continues against the uploader.

Yes, this is very roundabout, inefficient, and involves a lot of extra billable hours for lawyers. Lawyers love that kind of stuff.

...or at least that's how it worked before the DMCA safe harbor provisions came around.

Re:Opt Out!?

[ghostcorps]

AFAIK Australia is the only country where 'opt-out' options are illegal. Obviously not in this context, but its nice to know that Australian site, by-law, must not add you to any advertising lists unless you have opted-in. So if you find any sites ending .au that require you to 'untick' the spam box when you register, they are wide open for legal repercussions.

Re:Opt Out!?

[KDR_11k]

A DMCA takedown can be countered by a counterclaim. After that no further claims may be made (at least by the issuer of the takedown notice) and the matter must be resolved in court so taking content down when you don't own it won't work.

Re:Opt Out!?

[RobertM1968]

Which points out what I am trying to say... with the ability to click a link, or subscribe to a content blocking service where the major corp (RIAA, Viacom, etc) get to decide what stays and what gets taken down - without using the proper methods in the DMCA (which include some sort of proof that you own the material) - puts more power (which will probably be abused as even the DMCA has) in the hands of corporations.

Also, keep in mind, a counterclaim does not prevent he issuer of the takedown notice from trying again - especially if the counterclaim is (a) faulty, or (b) erroneous.

Re:copyright holders aren't going to provide anyth

[1001011010110101]

mmmm... I thought that all google (youtube) had to do was to take down the content if they receive a takedown notice...

so when will youtube's bitrate improve?

[jollyreaper]

It's a great service and all but I'd like to see these videos at a higher encode rate. (yes, I'm spoilt).

Re:so when will youtube's bitrate improve?

[Ant P.]

The next version of flash supposedly includes h264 support, which is miles better than the codec they're using now.

On a side note...

[Klaidas]

On a side note, they could work out those small bugs first, now couldn't they? Like, clicking on a thumbnai and then finding out it's been removed? Well then why include that result in the search anyway?
Doesn't bother first, but gets really annoying afterwards.
Also, isn't youtube so popular just because of all thr material they're going to remove? Who wants to watch some emos bitching about their day? (Those who want are probably on Myspace anyway).

Re:On a side note...

[QuesarVII]

On a side note, they could work out those small bugs first, now couldn't they? Like, clicking on a thumbnai and then finding out it's been removed? Well then why include that result in the search anyway?

I've thought about that issue too. In a way, it's good that they show the results in the search, and then show that the clip has been removed because of a media company's copyright claim. It makes regular Joes aware of an issue they might otherwise never have heard about.

Well, yeah

[rehtonAesoohC]

This means that movie and TV studios will have to provide decades of copyright material if they don't want it to appear on YouTube, or spend even more time scanning the site for violations
But at least they can!

How do you prove you own copyright?

[BeardsmoreA]

Having seen a few stories on this today the thing I still don't understand is how the 'true' copyright holders are identified to start with? What stops Joe Blogs uploading Spiderman 3 and claiming he created it and wants a cut of the revenue?

Or is this aimed solely at the 'megacorps' and not actually a wonderful means of sharing the wealth etc... (On the whole I like the pitch, and if they have a good answer to this problem, it generally sounds like a move the right way - assuming content providers take it up).

Re:How do you prove you own copyright?

[imgod2u]

This is an interesting point. On a tangent, what's to prevent the studios from just randomly marking any content they want, whether or not it's copyrighted, and having it taken down? What's the legal process provided to prove that said material really is copyrighted and owned by the person who claims that it is theirs?

Re:How do you prove you own copyright?

[Spy der Mann]

What stops Joe Blogs uploading Spiderman 3

Well, there's no Joe Blogs' Spiderman 3, but there's an indian superman :)

Re:How do you prove you own copyright?

[cliffski]

have you seen a DMCA takedown? you provide you name, address, phone number, and have to sign it, mail or fax it, no anon email notices here, plus you have to state on penalty of perjury that the information provided is accurate, including the means to contact you. basically, only a real dumb fuck would file a DMCA takedown that wasn't legit. if the takedown is opposed, its trivial to phone the person who issued it, and ultimately, an open and shut case to sue their ass for big bucks.
Good luck pretending superman 3 is yours, I think the fine is around $200k for being wrong.

Re:How do you prove you own copyright?

[Stray7Xi]

But these aren't DMCA takedowns. There's no such thing as a DMCA cut-me-in-on-profits.

All material

[Nosklo]

because the technology requires copyright holders to provide copies of the video they want to protect Wait. That means google will pretty soon have almost ALL COPYRIGHTED MEDIA in its servers?
I, for one, welcome our new media-holding overlords.
There's a lot of money to be made with this material, besides searching youtube. Even without releasing it.

Not too bad

[Se7enLC]

Obviously no company is going to actually go through and send google videos of all the stuff they want to protect, but what they CAN do is identify the videos already on gootube that need to be removed as copyrighted, so they can just use the offending videos as the sample to scan for. Prevent the same video clips from ending up online over and over again.

Re:copyright holders aren't going to provide anyth

[Anonymous Coward]

You are right.

Grandparent isn't familiar with how DMCA takedowns work.

Re:copyright holders aren't going to provide anyth

[Russ Nelson]

The problem is that Congress has created a safe harbor in the DMCA. Youtube can't be sued for copyright violation simply by providing an Internet service, as long as they cooperate with the copyright holder's right to control copying. Since youtube can't tell if somebody owns a copyright on something, requiring them to do so would mean that youtube couldn't exist. Most Internet services couldn't exist. The onus is on the copyright holder to find copyright violations and inform youtube. Congress may have screwed up other parts of the DMCA, but they got this part right.

Youtube is just giving copyright holders the right of prior restraint, at the cost of having to enumerate everything to which they claim copyright.

Re:copyright holders aren't going to provide anyth

[John Hasler]

> The problem is that Congress has created a safe harbor in the DMCA.

That's not a problem. It's a solution. It just happens to be a solution that the studios don't like.

What a scam!

[JeremyGNJ]

Pretty funny that google is trying to con people into building a digital library for them.

Think about how much google has spend just trying to build a library of books, and now they're getting people to build them a media library for free!

Danger, Fair use!

[Spy der Mann]

There are a lot of Anime Music Videos in there. I fear the artists (either greedy japanese companies or greedy RIAA members) will want to take them off.

But then again, I haven't RTFA so I don't know WTF is Youtube Filtering :P

So Children Can Watch

[Anonymous Coward]

the War On Everyone by George W. Bush et al.

Another Site With Automated Content Filtering

[szyzyg]

You might have missed out on imeem.com or at least ignored them ever since they changed from being a client/IM based p2p network to being a social media site about 2 years ago. But for the last 6 months they've been using automated content filtering for the music that people are posting to the site. Some of the people who register their content are have deals with imeem which allows the free sharing of their music - labels like Warners, Sony, BMG, Nettwerk, Beggars etc etc, and of course there are a few labels who have their tracks reduced to 30 second samples.

It should be noted that imeem announced all its big deals after turning its system on so presumably the content identification system helped make those media deals possible.

Fair Use

[John Hasler]

How are they going to handle fair use? MY guess: they won't. Your Steamboat Willie parody is not going to be allowed on Youtube.

I wonder how long it will take for the first software to come out that alters vidoes just enough to evade detection...

Video IQ

[Azreal]

Other than the sheer scale problem, couldn't a company just run the video through an identification program to ID the actors in the video, cross reference it with an imdb type database with both movies/shows and actors video IQ profile? Couple this with video fingerprinting to dispose of copies. Add in a system to freeze the offending video and allow the user who uploaded to be able to contest the infringement?

Audio is better than video for fingerprinting

[JRGhaddar]

Even though youtube is a video site they should have created an extensive audio fingerprint system.

That would be much better and with copyright material audio is the key. It covers both music and video. It is much smaller amount of data and and is easily identifiable across compression and formats.

Altering just the audio is a little trickier and if the audio is altered enough it really takes away from the viewing expierience sometimes making it unwatchable. Copyright holders would give google an audio fingerprint for their works and youtube would check all audio against that. Music & Video copywritten material could be protected at the same time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_fingerprint

Re:Audio is better than video for fingerprinting

[MsGeek]

This wouldn't work for Fan Music Videos. Especially if the song the clips were cut to was released outside the purview of the RIAA.

Re:Audio is better than video for fingerprinting

[JRGhaddar]

Fan Music Videos are a little different. They are artistic representations of the source material(s) and actually have a decent defense in court. Much in the same way as a DJ is allowed to mix and mashup music. A Fan music video works in the same regards. Now putting up the original video comissioned by the artist/record label without their consent should be removed.

Re:Audio is better than video for fingerprinting

[JazzLad]

So if I convert my hypothetical illegal mp3 library to xvid/avi & put some crappy homemade video to it it's legal? I can minimize a video player as easily as an audio player ...

(yes, I know it would be bigger, yes, it would be another generation, no, I am not admitting to having an illegal mp3 library, hence "hypothetical")

Re:Audio is better than video for fingerprinting

[JRGhaddar]

Nice ... well it is hypothetically theft as your intended use for the material is actually to only listen to the audio, however legally you could claim it is an artistic representation of the source material and more than likely win your lawsuit as the only way for the plantiff to prove his case is to concretely show that you minimize the video player all the time, and that would require some sort of spying-which while the homeland security is all for but most judges are against.

this is going to be a field day for lawyers

[t35t0r]

this is going to be a field day for lawyers

Re:this is going to be a field day for lawyers

[Anonymous Coward]

I just want to make sure I'm interpreting your post correctly. Are you saying this is going to be a field day for lawyers?

Re:copyright holders aren't going to provide anyth

[timmarhy]

why should it be someone elses job to protect their content?

GoogleTV

[Qubit]

A number of pundits out there said that GoogleTV would never fly, but now we know how they're going to get all of those video clips online. Man, Google is pretty smart!

http://youtube.com/watch?v=J9SK_M_nVWA

Copyright claims

[Neon Aardvark]

I have come across an instance of youtube deleting hundreds of newsreel films from an account which were public domain for over 60 years.

Maybe youtube should spend some time on finding out if the items they delete are actually in copyright first before deleting them, in addition to spending time on this system.

Do no evil, indeed.

[mattgreen]

...just aid and abet Highly Concentrated Forms of Evil, instead.

(Disclaimer: this post is a wake-up call to all who labor underneath naive good/evil views of corporate entities. I do not subscribe to such infantile views myself.)

Do they have to provide the movie or a hash?

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Do the copyright owners have to provide the entire damn clip to Google? Or just buy the hash/indexer too from Google, run it through their materials in their secure facility and give Google just the hash data base?

I'll gladly do this too.

[NoseyNick]

Hey, RIAA, please send me all your original media and I'll make sure there are no shared copies of any of it in my collection ;-)

Re:I'll gladly do this too.

[noidentity]

And hey, since it'll cost you (MAFIAA) a lot of bandwidth to send copies of material to all us to be sure each of our private collections is free of copyrighted material, we could set up a torrent for you. We'd like to help out.

Full copies are unnecessary

[MultisSanguinisFluit]

Technically speaking, one wouldn't need to provide google with copies of all infringing video. Youtube could give copyright holders a tool that would create signatures for their media. Then they'd have to give the signatures to Google. If the signature generation algorithm is mildly clever then basic artifacts like frame rate, resolution, and timing should not pose a problem to the detection routine. More cleverness in the algorithm could catch more deliberate circumvention attempts.

Video is only half the story

[OnesAndNoughts]

The sound track is probably easier to check and we're *much* more sensitive to changes made there, leaving very little wiggle room for deception.

Very bad idea.

[Spy der Mann]

It won't take long for content providers to work around your workarounds. Furthermore, youtube might ban such kind of workarounds. Worse: They might sue those who implement those ideas under DMCA, because your *explicit* intent is to circumvent copy protection measures. You don't want to appear in Fark news as "dumbass", do you?

You guys need to realize that if your intent is to preserve works of art from censorship, you would use either a darknet, or an Anonymous P2P system. I'm not saying the model works, it was just an idea... (<whisper>however, my sources inform me that there are people working in a revolutionary network which will allow you to run your favorite p2p apps on top of it - and even forums and e-mail. Some parts of it already work, but I won't tell... muahahahahaha!</whisper>)
*AHEM* *AHEM* Aaaaaanyway.... (insert angelic smile here)

This can be a great opportunity for content providers to upload commercials to youtube and generate revenue for popular clips, like the good old Bugs Bunny episodes (Little Red Riding Hood is my personal favorite - HEY GRANDMA!). Why? Because in the old TV model, the providers chose the content. In the Youtube model, the viewers choose. In other words, they're more willing to watch a determinate clip and not just get whatever the publisher shoves down their throat.

What am I trying to say? Commercials in copyrighted clips uploaded to youtube will be MUCH MORE effective than commercials in standard TV. Simply because the watcher is 100% decided to watch that clip.

Let's hope the copyright owners choose... <old_crusader>wisely.</old_crusader>

Public Domain

[eulernet]

This way, Google will be able to build a large library of copyrighted movies that will become public in 60 years, or when the copyright holder disappears. That's far sighted, if Google supposes that it will remain in business at this time !

In the background?

[negated]

What if you aren't actually uploading a clip of a video, but instead a clip in which the video in question is running on say, a TV in the background of the clip?

-S

Re:copyright holders aren't going to provide anyth

[alen]

true, but all they have to do is pay someone $1 an hour in a third world country to surf youtube and find violations. they don't have to go through their archives and turn all of their movies and music over to google for automatic

Re:copyright holders aren't going to provide anyth

[badasscat]

copyright holders aren't going to provide decades of anything since it's up to google to keep copyrighted content off youtube. no reason why a copyright holder needs to go through this

You mean, other than the DMCA, which says it's the copyright holders' responsibility to do so?

It's the law. It's not up to the copyright holders to dictate anything to Google. If they want their stuff off of YouTube, they need to police their own content.

And this was no accident, either - the law was written this way specifically anticipating cases like this. (Ok, they thought at the time that it was telecom companies who would be most affected, but the result is the same.) The point being that if service providers were forced to police the content on their networks on a continuous basis, it wouldn't be worth it for any of them to be in business. So they lobbied for this provision of the DMCA, and copyright owners acquiesced, knowing that on balance, the DMCA was a huge win for them.

They can't go back now and whine about the fact that they don't like the compromise that they agreed to, and which was the only way they got the DMCA passed in the first place. Unless that was their strategy to begin with - accept the compromise to get the DMCA passed, knowing they'd just pay off congress to amend it later - and I wouldn't put that past them.

Google Motto

[RuthlessMinx]

What happened to the old Google motto? "Don't be evil." Oh wait they gave that up long ago. Am I the only person who thinks Google's grown too large lately and should be split up. They're worse than Microsoft now. They have their fingers in everyone's pies. Search, online work collaboration, email, maps, digital video, and so on...

Re:Google Motto

[Ash-Fox]

What happened to the old Google motto? "Don't be evil." Oh wait they gave that up long ago.

I don't understand how this makes Google evil.

Am I the only person who thinks Google's grown too large lately and should be split up.

I haven't seen any illegal monopoly practices by Google yet.

They're worse than Microsoft now. They have their fingers in everyone's pies. Search, online work collaboration, email, maps, digital video, and so on...

Sorry, Microsoft has far more and Google certainly does not power as many things that Microsoft does. Even if it did, how is that evil? Why does that warrant it being split up?

No, "It's too big" is not a valid reason.

Re:Google Motto

[tade]

Well not to defend anyone but imagine the tool where "copyright holders" can get any content disappear without human review. The dudes and dudettes holding the copyrights are a pretty fishy bunch and by no means are they people like us. Now imagine a video showing Mitch Bainwol (Chairman and CEO
Recording Industry Association of America) in compromising position in a public place where filming is not illegal (if such places still exists in the USA). He can make that video or any other video he dislikes disappear by submitting it to Youtube and claim that he is the copyright holder.

How is youtube going to check the claims about having copyrighted work as part of the video?

Re:Google Motto

[Ash-Fox]

How is youtube going to check the claims about having copyrighted work as part of the video?

Probably by letting the copyright holder use existing copyright law to prove it.

Re:Google Motto

[tade]

Probably by letting the copyright holder use existing copyright law to prove it. Wasn't that the old procedure? They waited for the court order to remove any content but now that it is automated do you really think that there will be a verification of the claim of copyright before the video is put offline?

Re:Google Motto

[Ash-Fox]

Wasn't that the old procedure? They waited for the court order to remove any content but now that it is automated do you really think that there will be a verification of the claim of copyright before the video is put offline?

Current system is that people claim content X is theirs under prejury and then say that content X at location Y is not a authorized copy. False information on this matter can open them up to huge fines in a court of law.

All Google is doing, is removing the need todo Y.

Jihad on YouTube

[tdent1138]

I just wish YouTube would 'filter' out Jihadi videos... But they haven't/won't, because its Constitutionally protected 'free speech' for a foreign based terrorist organization to recruit online (I'm sure the ACLU and CAIR will take any cases pro-bono)...

Re:Jihad on YouTube

[Anonymous Coward]

...but Constitutional rights only apply to US citizens.

Decades?

[Stanislav_J]

This means that movie and TV studios will have to provide decades of copyright material if they don't want it to appear on YouTube, or spend even more time scanning the site for violations.

Given the amount of work that would entail, I doubt they will provide "decades" worth of comparison files -- they will likely concentrate on recent and/or popular (i.e., majorly profitable) material. NBC may well want to prevent "Heroes" from turning up on YouTube, but something tells me they aren't going into the archives to provide "fingerprints" of "Supertrain" or "Hello, Larry" or the Jean Doumanian era of SNL. (Well, in the latter case they might wish to keep those shows off YT out of sheer embarassment....)

Safe use of sql

[Tumbarumba]

SELECT boobies FROM "80's teen movies" WHERE Size >= ?

Nice use of prepared statements! Robert'); DROP TABLE Students;-- would be impotent against your sql-fu.

Re:Safe use of sql

[somersault]

How big is Robert exactly? Sadly I'm not even sure if you're being sarcastic or not as I've not had a lot of experience with prepared statements :p

Re:Safe use of sql

[aj50]

He's referencing this: http://www.xkcd.com/327/ However, using prepared statements with ? for variables unknown at compile time protects you from this type of exploit. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong about that.

Re:Safe use of sql

[nitehawk214]

He was referencing this xkcd comic.

Re:Safe use of sql

[Yoozer]

I think the term you're looking for is "parametrized queries".

Re:Safe use of sql

[somersault]

Hah I hadn't seen that one, that's a great idea :P

I Wonder...

[Nom du Keyboard]

I wonder if I inverted the image (rotated it 180 degrees), if the copyright filter would catch me. Turn your monitor 180 degrees to watch, or have a small app to flip the viewer's screen.

HASSAN CHOP!

[HTH NE1]

Copyright holders can choose what they want done with their videos: whether to block, promote, or even--if a copyright holder chooses to partner with us--create revenue from them, with minimal friction. YouTube Video ID will help carry out that choice. Because I'm certain Google realizes that a lot of these copyright holders are sittin' on a freaking gold mine here. YouTube is a genie out of the bottle, and the corporations hoarding copyrighted material are... Daffy Duck:

"Oh, I know what you want! You're after my treasure! Well it's mine, ya understand?! Mine! All mine! Get back in there! Down, down, down! Go, go, go! Mine, mine, mine!"

Re:HASSAN CHOP!

[Anonymous Coward]

Corporations: I can't help it, I'm a greedy slob, it's my hobby!

LOL, classic... thanks for the reminder.

Next months healine

[pseudorand]

Next months healine: YouTube Hacked Headline 2 Months from now: All copyrighted material ever created available via Kazaa.

by the letter of the law...

[Animaether]

Just to make clear - nobody (well, nobody sane) has ever suggested that Google check every new video upload to make sure the uploader has the rights to publish it; that would be impossible anyway. The major problem was with repeat offenses.

However, Google doesn't even have to automatically check for repeat offenses. I.e. if you upload X, it gets taken down because of a DMCA complaint, you can upload X again just fine. The copyright holder will have to file another DMCA complaint. It gets taken down, you upload it again, it gets taken down, you upload it again, it gets taken down, you upload it again, etc.

Some might think "HAHAHA! Suck the loophole, copyright holders!", but this ends up costing Google money and popularity as well (videos that pop up and get removed with some frequency hurt the whole experience more than a video not being available there at all).

So Google finally gets around to checking their existing library for any other video that appears to match X and flag that for removal (probably a quick manual check), and on new uploads tells the user that they may be uploading a video that appears to match X; with any luck they'll have an option for the user to say "no it isn't!" (for parody cases, or complete false positives - however rare), with penalty of having account (temporarily) canceled if they're basically just lying there in order to get the video uploaded anyway.

What I find more interesting is the option for the copyright holder to say "Hang on... we hold the copyright to that, but we know there's an interest in the videos, and users will try to upload it anyway... so why don't we allow that, and actually make a smidgen of money off it by allowing those uploads, but only with advertising?". Excellent, really.

But what's the O(n)?

[Anonymous Coward]

You make it sound like you compare two videos to each other. I don't think that such a utility would be that useful to YouTube, because you'd have to compare each new clip to each clip in the 'banned' column.

Or do you compute some sort of fingerprint which is easier to compare to each of the banned items?

Re:But what's the O(n)?

[ZorbaTHut]

Several tiered fingerprints, as I remember, of increasing cost and accuracy. It's been a while since I was working on that project. It was indeed designed to scale to a huge amount of video - not the amount that YouTube has now, but I suspect it would have scaled up quite well.

and then...

[J05H]

and the material would be available at the stroke of a keyboard. It would be inevitable if Youtube has the material that it will end up available online. YouTube (Google) is positioning itself as the "channel" of the Internet. Part of what they will eventually offer, IMHO, is micro-payments based on viewership. To them, it doesn't matter if it's Gone With the Wind or home-cam video, it's just content. That sort of situation is win-win for the studios. Their next trick will be offering the studios some kind of cut of user-edited videos based on percentage of each copyright holder's material. This would allow users to remix video at will and everyone gets a fair cut of advertising dollars. YouTube benefits from having even more content and a provides a fair playing field for all involved.

On an artistic note, people need material to practice video editing. Being able to recut shots from other projects is a valuable learning experience. Every Naruto fan-vid on YouTube is someone learning to edit.

Josh

Media Companies-- be careful what you ask for...

[Kazoo the Clown]

What I like most about this scheme is that in order for it to work, it puts a huge onus on the copyright owners to proactively register their works with Google now, to an extent they probably didn't even have to with the US Copyright office. They can no longer complain to Google for lack of protection if they are too lazy to upload everything they own (and for most of the big majors, that's a lot of stuff). This lets Google off the hook and simplifies the takedown process for them, while giving the big media companies essentially what they asked for:

Google as new Copyright registrar. I love it!

With regards to matching-- I agree that accurate matching is probably not all that hard, you could probably reduce everything to 32x32 64 color pixels sampled @ 1 fps and fuzzy match the results and identify the vast majority of stuff-- and let humans check for false positives if necessary-- you could immediately have the system put a vid on "suspension" if it looks to be infringing until an eyeball gets the chance to look at it to confirm. Though I would guess that false positives could be pretty darn rare so that may not even be necessary. Things like uploading copyrighted vids backwards won't be useful to most people but could be included in the match anyway if it was a problem. Even completely shuffling the frame positions of the entire video may not be a good workaround, as you could sort the frames in some way and then compare them, then try them inverted or flipped or shifted-- the worst these operations might do in the long run is cause the matching algorithm to run longer as it tries more and more permutations that one might apply to the content...

On the other hand, Google may have to periodically rerun all the original content through their fingerprinting algorithm to regenerate the database as they tune up its accuracy, which given a huge database of registered works could end up being a resource consuming enterprise...

well...

[chelanfarsight]

i for one welcome our cataloging overlords.

Hello everybody out there using youtube -

[erlehmann]

I'm doing a (free) video content management system (just a hobby, won't be big and
professional like google video) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing
since july, and is starting to get ready. I'd like any feedback on
things people like/dislike in youtube, as my CMS resembles it somewhat
(same logical layout of the web frontend (due to practical reasons)
among other things).

I've currently converted "britney_nackt_xxx.xvid" and "on-night-in-paris.wmv", and things seem to work.
This implies that I'll get something practical within a few months, and
I'd like to know what features most people would want. Any suggestions
are welcome, but I won't promise I'll implement them

                                JoSch (josch@mister-muffin.de)

PS. Yes - it's free of any youtube code, and it has a multi-threaded encoding process.
It is NOT protable (uses a perl lib only in ubuntu 7.10 etc), and it probably never
will support anything other than porn, as that's all I have :-(.

( trac at http://mister-muffin.de/proj )

Please use an alternative to youtube. Censorship

[zymano]

Youtube may have been first but their video is crap. It's very pixelated.

Censorship on youtube is growing. You can't comment anymore on controversial subjects: No more immediate posting of comments. It's crap. Don't even get me started on 'no commentable' videos.

Also what about the phony fake actors thinking it's their ticket to fame.

And the crappy videos everywhere that have no purpose but SPAM.

Youtube sucks. Please use an Alternative like Blip.tv or Stage6. Both are better quality also.

Circumvention Ideas Continued

[Mr. Vage]

6. A filter that randomly rearranges every pixel in the video. I call it the Confetti Filter©®(TM).

Problem solved

[mrCasual]

"Hello, YouTube? Yes, hi. This is NBC. We're sending you a live, real-time feed of all the material we consider copyrighted. It's called Channel 4."

Naruto

[Inquisitor911]

Hopefully this will mean the 8 million Narutp videos will vanish from YT.

I'm worried.

[Comboman]

It's funny that anytime this sort of thing pops up, most people are heavily debating how to defeat the system, rather than worrying about their own original content (or parody content/etc.) getting falsely flagged.

I'm worried. Any system that is tolerant enough to be immune to the king of circumvention techniques mentioned would also create a huge number of false positives, especially if the analysis length was short. I'd hate for Star Wars Kid to get taken down because it was flagged as a clip from The Phantom Menace.

one day?

[Anonymous Coward]

moviez/moviez ftp.youtube.com

Re:Please use an alternative to youtube. Censorshi

[Dr.Boje]

I have to agree with you. Youtube is terrible and their new filtering system is only going to lower the amount of traffic that visits their site.

Who will visit?

[mcalwell]

Who will visit youtube when all that's on it are adolescent pranks shot on cellphones?

Re:Who will visit?

[freezingweasel]

The same people who watch Jackass, visit Consumption Junction etc.

Also people who think adolescent pranks are more entertaining than what's on tv.

What's more, if you like the prank, you can send the YouTube link to your friend, and it's there to view tomorrow if you want to see it again, no DVR or VCR needed.

Re:Who will visit?

[mcalwell]

But overall, how many people is that? And how long before such clips require written consent of all parties before they become legal?

Re:Who will visit?

[freezingweasel]

> But overall, how many people is that?

I'd say the market for offbeat random junk is fairly huge. Look at Southpark. Why the heck was Beavis and Butthead allowed to go on so long with crappy animation and the show repeatedly interrupted by 5-10 seconds of watching the main characters head bang?

Never underestimate the market for trash. There's no end to the cute/funny collection of picture sites on the net.

> And how long before such clips require written consent of all parties before they become legal?

This wouldn't be that big an issue. 1st the same people who upload Star Wars now will continue to do so, with faked signatures. Secondly, as far as home-grown content, the burning urge for kids to get on TV (or YouTube) will have a ready supply of willing-to-sign free actors for any movie you might care to make.

Consider the Internet tax ban. I see that being repealed 1st, as much as the RIAA and MPAA may be drooling over the thought of suing more people, the federal government, state and local governments are drooling far worse at the opportunity to tax the net. It's VERY unlike Congress to hold back taxes like this. I believe the net is seen as the goose that lays the golden egg, and Congress is trying to be careful not to kill it, although it's hard to tell how good their grasp on what they can/can't get away with is.

Lou Reed is pirating the pirates who pirate him

[gambolt]

He's ripped tons of youtube clips of himself off the site and put them up on his site. He can't own the copyright to a lot of them.

music

[Lehk228]

i am going to start an audio posting site, in order to ensure my users do not violate copyright law i am requesting all music labels to submit to me their entire catalog in electronic form for the purpose of building an automated filter.

Easily caught.

[gillbates]

Having worked on video in the past, all of these are easily caught. In fact, the most economical way of catching infringers is to simply pass both videos through low pass filters, and compare the videos over a distance of several frames. If you can find a series of frames in which the majority of the pixels are close, chances are good that it's a copy.

And the clip-backwards technique could likewise be defeated by mimicking your player.

Uh

[bdjacobson]

So you want it Gorey?

DON'T CLICK THE LINK

[Breakfast Pants]

Huge spoiler, don't click unless you want to have the ending to one of the greatest movies of all time ruined forever.

Re:copyright holders aren't going to provide anyth

[freezingweasel]

> it's up to google to keep copyrighted content off youtube.

How? If you write an article about something, it's automatically copyrighted. This happens whether you officially register for a copyright or not. Registering has benefits in terms of legal actions later, but I'm still not allowed to take your article and put it online myself without your permission.

Given that EVERYTHING is copyrighted, what CAN YouTube display?

You tell YouTube when you upload a video, that you own the copyright to that video, and are granting them permission to show it. If you post something that isn't yours, YOU posted it, YouTube didn't break into your pc and rip it off your hard drive.

How is YouTube supposed to know whether something is copyrighted BY SOMEONE OTHER THAN YOU when you upload it? Two ways:

Passive: Leave it up under the assumption that you did no wrong until you have reason to believe otherwise. If you post Star Wars online, George Lucas can then say, "HEY! That's mine!" and request that it be removed. As I understand it, the DMCA explicitly authorizes this. If I don't like YouTube, should I be allowed to post Star Wars anonymously, report it to the MPAA and kep posting mutated versions of it as YouTube deletes them to feed an MPAA lawsuit against them? On the other hand, this lets the pirates stay a step ahead.

Active: Don't let anything be posted until you verify the owner owns it. You either have to compare the work against every single movie registered with the copyright office (pretty much impossible, even for PCs, are you going to make a database of checksums-of-a-sort of every frame of every copyrighted work to compare frame by frame against the uploaded video? Hollywood has how many hours/years/canturies of content created, to protect both audio and video of? This completely ignores the much largr problem of unregistered copyrighted work. Perhaps a panel could be formed of all the big IP holders, and they'ed have to approve something before it can be posted... except that they've already sent takedown notices on works they don't own, so they might well claim EVERYTHING submitted to them is copyrighted. Even if they took their job seriously though, and only said no on the things they actually owned, what about all the lesser IP holders who then don't get protection?

We can be passive, favor the smalltime pirates and have videos show quickly after posting or active and favor abuse by companies who have demonstrated they'll perform said abuse while greatly increasing the time before anything appears.

The real problem of YouTube is that it's competition. TV execs don't want the competition, and they don't need a legal precedent that allows them to strongarm something off the net that exists for a good purpose.

Should you, if given a CD from a friend (of his band's music) have to have it submitted to a committee to determine that none of it is owned by the RIAA and get an approval patch code to put in your CD player to make it work?

Sometimes the Children Pay

[LifesABeach]

In the Video "Grove Tube" there is a public service announcement about the problems of Venereal Diseases. I firmly believe that this movies message of such a public problem is a shame to loose under the copy write banner. Can someone point me to an anchor that has this important message? Please?

lots of features missing @ youtube ,,,

[freaker_TuC]

I'm creating a system myself; already for a couple of years now; which is more a FMS (File Management System) instead of a CMS. It supports not only normal videos but also almost any file which can be read out using Linux, Perl and some C++ for the faster routines. This goes from audio-video to documents, 3d files, models, 20 different image formats (thx to ImageMagick) and lots more..

The system auto-converts videos, audio, documents etc to a much more readable format, ready to be casted upon a computer, pda, cellphone, anything which has a webbrowser built in.

The libraries are already at version 4 as we speak and there are still a lot of things missing. Youtube is rather a database, coupled to a website; while the IF I'm designing is rather a website/script which reads out the files immediately ; broadcasting them in different (secure) ways. Combine this with a fully supported XML in/export for the metadata available for that file; an easy policy of changing this data and you got yourself a nice FMS which can do lots more than Youtube.

When I'm getting at version 5 I'm thinking about dedicating earlier versions as OSS; this way diversity can be created around the world without giving away the latest code which is also going to be used for my company. Call me protective although I've also invested my time and money in this system which I sure don't just want to give away like that before hosting it myself first ;)

easier than expected ?

[freaker_TuC]

A few things that can be done to avoid hash verification ..

  - Add a watermark in the video
  - Add something in the beginning or the end
  - Alter the colors a bit
  - Convert to 16:9 ;)

lots more which can be done, although these tricks should already defeat any early hash checking code.

Google could give out their code analyzer...

[Anonymous Coward]

[timmarhy wrote] how the f*** else do you suggest they do it? defending copyrights has ALWAYS been up to the holder, not the rest of us.

Since Google gives everything out for free, why not give out the analyzer program itself so that copyright holders can generate the necessary data that YouTube will then use for making the comparisons?

To use an analogy, this would be as if Google gave out a checksum generator, and copyright holders would run the Google program on their data and send the computed checksum back to Google.

Two problems

[codingmasters]

1) this new copyright protection system is easily circumvented by altering one pixel of one frame in the video, making it pointless and a waste of time 2) assuming big companies do provide the "decades of material", what happens if Youtube gets hacked?