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

[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.

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

[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.

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

[neveragain4181]

INNER JOIN?

!

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!

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?

[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.

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

[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: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.

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

[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

[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.

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.

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.

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: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.

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.

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: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.

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: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: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.

Naruto

[Inquisitor911]

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