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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?"
The media companies love standards when it suits them, such as when it limits the technology companies power (as in music DRM or content filtering). However, when the standards become, well, too standard, they want their own proprietary formats. NBC pulls out of ITunes because they didn't like the standard pricing. Sony tweaks its DVD's because it doesn't like the standard DRM (and I rented a coaster from Blockbuster recently, thanks Sony).
Viacom says "we believe in following the consumers". The real quote was "We believe in following the consumers as long as it pleases us. Otherwise fuck the consumers."
First up we have a new variant on googlebombing. The filter will be gamed by content owners to pick up on anything they possibly can.
This is because of the asymmetric costs. A false positive will cost them nothing, but the poster will get zapped. Indeed blockingd free content will serve the industry quite nicely.
There are >50 content formats, and new ones keep appearing. If the "standard" filter cannot read them, then the obvious thing to do is ban them.
You've now established a monopoly where only "approved" formats are allowed.
Even if it is an open standard, who writes the filter for new formats ? More importantly, who pays ?
It is also an arms race, and I think we can be clear that the "standard" filter will not be open source.
DRM attracts crackers in direct proportion to it's success. Many crackers may not be fans of economics, but their goals are easily modelled in economic terms.
They want to take out the "big beast" current filters are small, unsucessful critters.
Cracking the industry standard media filter will be more of a coup than breaking WEP, and thus inevitably be swamped.
Also, an entertaining technical/legal point is so many site use Linux so the GPL may get involved.
Dominic Connor,Quant Headhunter
I say give them the filter. It should be built into every node of the network, so the network flat refuses to transmit Viacom's material, or that of any other copyright holder who wants out of the Internet. Surely a network that will only transmit stuff under a free license would have to be every free software author's dream?
> Control is controlled by the need to control. The content providers will shoot themselves in the feet so many times that they won't have a leg to
> stand on.
Control is controlled by the copyright owners. They own the copyright, so they have the moral and often the legal right to control access to the material. If Google wants to pay billions for a method of distributing copyrighted material then it has to enter into a contract with the copyright owners, otherwise it might prove to be something of an expensive mistake.
It's telling that you've conceded that `almost every link worth watching` is owned by someone. Don't you think that it's because it's been professionally produced by people whose business is to produce stuff that there's a market for? Sure, I'm sure every 10 years there'll be a Blair Witch or whatever, but I'm not sure I'd start a business on that basis.
Someone's going to have to break this gently to Google's shareholders!
TFA is a summary of comments made at the Web 2.0 Summit which reference another announcement which summarizes these principles.
Considering who's on the press release - NBC Universal, Disney, Viacom, Fox, Microsoft, MySpace, Dailymotion (who?), veoh (who??) - the proposed principles are actually fairly balanced. They mention fair use four times, including a statement that "When sending notices and making claims of infringement, Copyright Owners should accommodate fair use" and "If the UGC Service is able to identify specific links that solely direct users to particular non-infringing content on such [piracy-oriented] sites, the UGC Service may allow those links while blocking all other links" and even "If a UGC Service adheres to all of these Principles in good faith, the Copyright Owner should not assert a claim of copyright infringement against such UGC Service with respect to infringing user-uploaded content that might remain on the UGC Service despite such adherence to these Principles."
It's worth reading the whole principles statement. I'm sure there are things that could be tweaked, but there are no major outrages that jump out at me; I'm actually kinda impressed.