Viacom Wants Industry Wide Copyright Filter

slashqwerty writes "Unsatisfied with the proprietary copyright filter Google recently unveiled, Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman has called for an industry standard to filter copyrighted material. Mr. Dauman has the backing of Microsoft, Disney, and Universal. 'They reflect the fact that there ought to be a filtering system in place on the part of technology companies,' he noted. 'Most responsible companies have followed that path. What no one wants is a proprietary system that benefits one company. It is a big drain to a company like ours to have to deal with incompatible systems.' How would an industry standard impact freedom of speech and in particular censorship on the internet? How would it affect small, independent web sites?"

Comments

Re:Youtube

[vux984]

You will probably find most pirated copies of Windows users also have valid OEM licenses, they just choose to use the retail or MSDN or VLK edition. This will have little impact on the Windows market. It is when Windows is not TAXED on OEM hardware you will see an impact.

No. Not by a long shot.

You will find that MANY pirated copies of windows (at least in the western hemisphere) are 'justified' in terms of I pirated XP because my last computer had OEM XP, it died, and the system restore disk wouldn't work on my new PC. Technically that is an infringing copy, as OEM versions are non-transferable to new units.

You will also find boatloads of people with XP Pro that 'upgraded' from their XP Home, and wouldn't pay the ridiculous retail upgrade price from one to the other. You'll also find people with an infringing copy of XP Home or Pro installed because the PC originally came with 98, 2000 or god forbid, ME.

I'd say its true that most of boxes out there are backed by a legit windows license, but most are not the version/edition that they are licensed for.

Yeah, there's people that have OEM Pro and installed VLK or MSDN edition to avoid activation hassles. (I myself was on an infringing VLK edition for a while, because my 'legit' was an original retail upgrade, while the VLK was a full version SP2... so it was FAR less hassle (no disk flipping, no activation, and hours of patches avoided.) When genuine advantage came out and got in my face and I got tired of hacking around it I reverted to the legit copy. Wasted half a day. (I couldn't just change the key because it rejected my legit original upgrade key.)

But in my experience that's a distinct minority, most people with XP Pro VLK/MSDN didn't actually have a legit version of XP Pro. They had a legit version of Windows XP Home, or an older version of windows... but not XP Pro.

Proposed Copyright Standard

[jc42]

industry standard to filter copyrighted material

How about we suggest the following standard:

1. the © character (Unicode 00A9, or decimal 251), followed by
2. the date of the copyright, followed by
3. the name of the copyright holder, optionally followed by
4. an email or web address to contact the copyright holder

I've heard that a system similar to this (but lacking part 4.) is already in use in some publications.

Such a copyright standard would make it easy to use hundreds (or thousands) of programs that already exist to filter copyrighted material and determine what to do with it.

Think anyone would go for it?

Maybe we should write up an RFC ...