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

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.

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.