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Google's New Scheme To Avoid Unlicensed Music
An anonymous reader writes "Complaints about copyright infringement on YouTube keep Google busy. If you have any doubts, just look at the Viacom copyright suit. But the problems aren't just about uploaded videos, but sometimes the music accompanying the videos. A patent application shows that Google has worked on a system to automatically identify infringing music by comparing a digital signature of a soundtrack to signatures of existing music. Users who upload videos could opt to completely remove the video, swap the soundtrack for something approved, or to mute the video. Of course, there doesn't seem to be a provision if you're using existing music with permission."
Really? I thought collages were fair use; how is it not fair use to combine music with an original video?
Palm trees and 8
Let's hope Iceland's data haven, if they actually get it, can make it possible.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
If only there were a way to decentralize these things...
Palm trees and 8
This is what Audible Magic does. Exactly.
http://audiblemagic.com/index.asp
So google is doing it again?
still no sig
Have they not been doing this already for certain artists that have opped into it? I know that Youtube has thrown me an error when attempting to upload a video with licensed music in it before and gave me the option of uploading with a disabled audio track. In fact, this system seems to have been rolled out in 2007.
It is time to stop the extortion for waves of air. Air costs nothing, making air move costs nothing, music in it self costs almost nothing to record (sure you can go to a really expensive studio, but you sure as hell don't have to do that to get a great record of moving air). So, the music mafia can go F herself as far as I am concerned. Musicians play live, musicians make their living with their performances. That should be the standard, if you can't perform live or sing without autotune, you are not a musician. Simple as that. But for that small group of talentless people who get bought into a number 1 place on the charts we all need to suffer? I am done doing that. And saying that, I make my living as a musician and photographer. This all is just idiotic. It is like having a bar and some friendly guy walks in to offer you protection. For a price. And you will need that protection... /end of rag
I was under the impression they already had this for some time now, at least for certain labels/artists.
Doesn't it say below the video (on occasion) < $SONG_NAME - buy it now at $STORE >?
Obviously the detection is functional if that works.
Sent from my PDP-11
Air costs nothing, making air move costs nothing, music in it self costs almost nothing to record
It costs little to turn a screw, but it costs plenty to know which screw to turn.
Musicians play live, musicians make their living with their performances. That should be the standard, if you can't perform live or sing without autotune, you are not a musician. Simple as that.
I prefer to see a songwriter's position as closer to that of a magazine columnist or a book author: arranging words (or music) on a page and not necessarily expecting to have to perform them live.
My fiancée has had DMCA takedown notices from recording companies even after having express permission to use music on her blog from the artists themselves.
Whether those are valid depends on whether the artist had assigned the sound recording copyrights to the label in a contract. A composer or recording artist can't license rights that he had already sold to someone else.
AFAIK there is no fair use exception for copyrighted music.
Not even in a video about how someone's music is similar to someone else's? A video like this would, in my view, fall squarely under the spirit of 17 USC 107, which specifically mentions "purposes such as criticism [or] comment" . I can see a defense for this under at least factors 1, 3, and 4, and the court in Luther Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music ruled the same way about a spoof of Roy Orbison's "Oh, Pretty Woman".
It seems that you can resolve copyright issues by claiming fair-use. I came across this post a few days at rcgroups. Scroll down to post #5 for the procedure.
I have a bunch of really old student student news shows up on my personal account. The opening used at best 15 seconds of some random pop song du jour. The audio on the video is now completely muted because of god forbid 15 seconds of fair use music.
It's not even worth the effort to edit and upload the videos. Youtube is no longer useful for what its intended purpose was.
Creativity is rotating through Eye of the Tiger, We Are the Champions, Rock and Roll, part 2 and We Will Rock You.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
This is known as a perceptual hash. We have a perceptual audio hash in pHash, my open source software project that will tell you how similar two media files are to each other. It also features an indexing system to find the best matches from a sample audio clip, a la Shazam. These algorithms are not new by any means, although this patent goes a bit further than simply matching audio samples.
No only Google: you can do it on your own PC!
The Picard Tagger from MusicBrainz can generate an audio fingerprint (PUID) from all files in a folder and then fetch the correspondent metadata from the community CC licensed music database.
Dilbert RSS feed
There also needs to be a fair use option. There are cases where one is exercising fair use while using a recording. Also, if the software is too eager to make a match, it may have false negatives for parodies.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Google has gone positively copyright absolutist - not just in YouTube (which, of course, grew up on a steady diet of infringement), but also in Adwords and maybe Adsense.
Adwords now disallows ads with phrases like "music videos" or "Internet TV," under the theory that any site advertising such must be guilty of, not just infringement, but "hacking and cracking." As their standard of proof is "guilty until proven innocent," arguing with them is fairly frustrating...
it is far more likely Viacom (or whoever) merely submitted a batch of DMCA's through an automated process that wrongfully flagged the same fair use (in this case, permitted) case.
OCILLA takedown notices are made under penalty of perjury. That'd be helpful if the FBI actually cared about copyright perjury.
I completely "get it" that the entertainment companies need to protect their copyrighted material. That's their product, and it's how they make money; fair enough that they don't want people exploiting it.
But here's an example of them going too far: The other day I was watching clips from The West Wing on Youtube. I'm not sure how exactly I got there, but regardless, it was one of my favorite shows back in the day, even though the West Wing franchise never got a dime from me either through product purchases or ads. But after seeing a couple of clips, I was reminded of how much I liked the show, and started to consider purchasing the DVD set -- until I clicked on a clip that had no sound. Then I saw that great "this video contains audio not approved by..." on the top of the screen.
Needless to say, that killed the viewing experience right there. I think when the entertainment companies revisit the sheer dollars and cents, they might see that it's beneficial to leave a lot of this copyrighted material up there -- it might generate a few sales.
Nemilar http://www.techthrob.com - Visit Me!
Google should say, "Because it is too difficult in the United States, the land of freedom, to offer a public venue for the sharing of creative works and the preservation of culture, we have opted to shut down youtube entirely. We sincerely hope that such services can return in a time less plagued by corruption and greed."
Sounds similar to what tools like MusicBrainz can do. http://musicbrainz.org/
This seems like it will be a moot point when most artists inevitably start self releasing. Zoe Keating's cello album debuted at #7 on the billboard classical charts entirely from bandcamp.com sales with no label. As a media producer, this is really exciting, because theoretically all I would have to do is contact her to use her songs in my creations. No labels involved. The tide is definitely shifting in the direction of self releasing, making the RIAA increasingly irrelevant. Since self released songs are also theoretically protected by some kind of copyright, how will YouTube handle this, or are they only concerned if you use the dribble that major labels put out?
This has potential, and the guys at google probably know it too.
If they are able to identify whether a song is under copyright, then they can probably identify the song proper. They could soon be deploying some sort of search system that takes some music as input ad gives you its name.
GPG 0x1B479C78
From my experience, adjusting the pitch of the audio by +4% (without altering its duration) is enough to fool Google's algorithm without being noticeable/distracting, unless you're playing the original song and the altered song side-by-side.
Of course, there doesn't seem to be a provision if you're using existing music with permission."
You know what? Great! If a work isn't permissible for Youtube in general, it should be banned altogether. Maybe this will finally give copyright holders some incentive to stop being such colossal dicks about what people do with their music.
What if you shoot a video of something that has a copywritten track in the background simply because that track was playing out of speakers somewhere where you were shooting your (unrelated) video? I doubt that garbled background sound makes you a prime target to the filter, but I could be wrong. Still, I'm curious, but pessimistic that this type of video would fall under the 'banned' category.
Just load up the music you want to (fairly) use in Audacity and change the pitch up or down by .5 semitones, enough to be imperceptible by the human ear but just confuse the digital fingerprinting enough to not get picked up.
Ironically enough, there are hundreds of videos about how to do this on YouTube, of all places.
That's their product, and it's how they make money; fair enough that they don't want people exploiting it.
Except in most cases the product is created by artists, but for some reason "owned" by the people who print CDs; doesn't actually seem all that fair.
sic transit gloria mundi
Why can't things like this become vaporware instead of useful things like Duke Nukem Forever
There's a reasonable TED presentation from YouTube's "head of user experience", Margaret Gould Stewart which described how this system works. Not a huge amount of details, but worth the few minutes to watch it
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/margaret_stewart_how_youtube_thinks_about_copyright.html
...YouTube was the last place where I could be bothered with that unlicensed music.
Now it is gone and the copyright owners have to listen to their music themselves.
I've got a video up right now (over 21,000 views) consisting of a series of photos of an antique car that I'm restoring accompanied by a complete U2 song. Total run time is over 3 minutes. There is a notation under a copyright information button that states...
Your video, Xxxxxxxx, may include content that is owned or licensed by these content owners:
Content owner: UMG Type: Audio content
What should I do?
No action is required on your part. Your video is still available worldwide. In some cases ads may appear next to your video.
The video's been online for over two years.
/. Dissent will not be tolerated. Think like us or perish.
Here is a good video about Youtube's copyright violation detection system: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoX-YihV_ew
Fuck them, let's all use creative commons music in our videos, there's a lot of great stuff available.
Let's give them their way and see how they like it when independent artists start taking a piece of their pie.
Careful what you wish for big media.
^^vv<><>BA
If only fair that you pay property tax.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
1. play 'Down With The Sickness' while recording kazoo track ...
2. mix with Audacity
3. add to some innocuous video (kittens, ponies)
4. upload video
5.
6. profit!
I can totally hear how this would sound!
Studios are well-known for using temporary music in upcoming movie trailers, sometimes from sources they don't control.
The day will come when some big-movie trailer comes along and gets uploaded to YouTube by a studio, only to play to resounding silence. Then it'll be, "Dear Google, please remove this feature."
This kills even legal use of music.
Unfortunately yes. Perhaps a way around this will be provided later.
More to the point from Google's perspective: it would kill the "unauthorized uploads" and other astroturfing or marketing tricks that Viacom indulged in and then used to sue Google.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
No, they shouldn't. That's exactly what the RIAA wants. They want to monopolize all the money being made from music.
What they should *really* do is to compare all of the RIAAs songs with one another to point out exactly how unoriginal they are (especially if they compare them to old songs where the lyrics arrangement, if not the recording rights, should be in the public domain). After all, there's not much that's truly original and Hollywood was founded by people evading Edison's patent enforcers.
Given their attitudes, they would start a war of litigation amongst themselves, leaving them with less money and fewer lawyers to bother the rest of us with. Also, it would be interesting to point out exactly where certain haughty folks got their ideas from. There are only just so many notes and with the small number required for a court to find infringement, I can't help but think that they'd infringe upon *something.*
A map of who has "stolen" (to borrow their word) from whom would be quite interesting, as well.
unless you scream like no one has screamed before.
I think there are a number of systems already in circulation that do this, so let's see who will hit Google first..
Insert
Let's restart the Internet based upon a non-US centric point of view.
Google is holding the Internet in place by largely selling out to lawyers, we should establish a new search that is lawyer resistant.
We need a method to write search algorithms and as a community run the engine.
The Internet has become far too centralized, DNS is horrendous, IP allocation is backwards and bureaucratic
We can't even get SSL certs issued for every site on the Internet without forking over $80 for the mystery work they do.
The work around would be to make firefox less paranoid about self signed certs
I wouldn't bet on that either, it needs to be forked away from mozilla to add actual innovations and not just new window dressing
It is clear we need to move on from port 80 and build the next gen internet service
We now know providers will do deep packet inspection on our traffic for the list brokers
We know network engineers are for the most part Nazis who want to control the traffic and the network rather than building the network to accommodate the traffic
Even if we need to return to dial-up for a few years it would beat the hell out of this over-commercialized, watched, screened, lawyer crap we have now
Lets just make new open stuff for a change, prototype in python, someone will rewrite it in C, encrypted always, privacy by default, secure by default
I'm going to go raise alpacas if this shit doesn't get fixed soon
Let's make a new internet and light some dark fiber
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTJMyQuN0rw
This video is blocked in Germany because supposedly it infringes Sony BMG's copyright. That's right. The whole video. Not just the sound. Not to mention the sound was not added but rather played during the performance.
What a stupid argument. In most cases ownership is transferred when you exchange something (ideally) of equal value. Otherwise almost everything you currently own was not created by you.
I used my video camera to film a circus performance. The video was disabled because the sound from the loudspeakers was on my video and that sound was copyrighted music.
At the same time, the same music title was spread around youtube in full glory with accompanying original video clip in dozens of copies and was not blocked. Why is my analog recording blocked and the digital 1:1 copies are not?
Faire use, my ass!
Atari rules... ermm... ruled.
In fact, we need some new internet radio protocol based around mixing software and bittorrent. A radio stations publish their playlist for the next 24 hours along with torrent files for albums containing the songs they'll play and mixing instructions. Your radio software fires up the torrents for all songs scheduled during the next 24 hours for all stations you've set active. You radio software's AI follows the mixing instructions broadcast by those stations as well as possible given what songs downloaded successfully.
Your radio software naturally keeps an enormous cache of songs played regularly by stations you like. You might instruct it to keep songs permanently, or even download whole albums.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
It would seem like a good system to help copyright holders be aware of usage. If it flagged videos for review by the holder, then left it to them to request take-down, that would seem to re-enforce Google's existing safe harbor protection, and would give artists the opportunity to not be douche bags. Of course, even with this, if you wanted to block something from being uploaded to youtube, like perhaps a political speech, you could just walk around with a boombox blaring Metallica's greatest hits in the background.
"Don't you know you're going to shock the monkey?"- Peter Gabriel
Why not rely on dmca safe harbor to protect against lawsuit from riaa? It's free and requires little to no work on google's part.
> Of course, there doesn't seem to be a provision if you're using existing music with permission."
We should all do this! A kind of anti-DRM: if the music is legally licensed, then the app/hardware won't play it.
That would drive the greedy jerks out of business real quick!
Though it's been made illegal to circumvent encryption, maybe there's no prohibition to not decode encrypted songs... ?
Maybe an "update" could fix systems to behave this way.
>8-D
your average artist, raised in an internet-dependent world, will begin to weigh the costs and benefits of locking his music down
1. to the point of public absence, for the promise of reaping cash from recording purchases, versus
2. letting his music go anywhere, for free, to the point of maximum exposure, but at the cost of no recording revenue. however, with more popularity because of more exposure, he'll fill more warm butts in concert halls
it's all about exposure. which the internet gives you for free. this is an economic argument that trumps the entire business case for the entire recording industry. and so the internet will kill the recording industry, simple economics
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Except in most cases the product is created by artists, but for some reason "owned" by the people who print CDs; doesn't actually seem all that fair.
The "some reason" is the artist goes to a publisher who will take on the potential risk of the artist, and invest in marketing the artist. In exchange the publisher "owns" the rights, and will share with the artist as per the contract. In some cases the artist may get an absurdly small share, but they agreed to it. Different artists choose different routes of how they want to publish. Nothing stops the artist from being self-published, and indeed the Internet has helped small artists get a broader audience.
You just have to believe that your automated tools are effective.
A copyright owner can use the automated tools once and get a round of numerous counter-notices. This should make the tools' defects clear to a reasonable person. So the copyright owner is a bit more on the hook if it uses the automated tools again. See also Lenz v. Universal .
thank you for bringing up radio, which IS EXACTLY THE SAME BUSINESS MODEL: give it away for free, for the sake of exposure. exposure=$ to be cashed in later
i didn't mention advertising, adwords is not important
just put your music out there, someone will find it. simple as that: there are hundreds of people who posted youtube videos who are not advertising anything and reaping tons of exposure... and cash. recent slashdot story:
http://idle.slashdot.org/story/10/06/30/1343209/David-After-Dentist-Made-150k-For-Family
in fact, since you bring up adwords, i counter with adsense: your average popular band can make a nice chunk of change with ads on their site
and finally, yes: there are tons of demographics that are less likely to have high speed access. and those old rural folks can listen to their polka CDs in their growing irrelevance. who cares? it's like saying CDs won't work because some old fogey is sticking with vinyl. whatever
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
the business model of radio and broadcast tv is a valid concept. payola is a subset of that business model, not the whole business model
you give it away for free, you get lots of exposure, you turn that exposure into cash
worked for broadcast television, worked for radio, and works for the internet
there is this notion that media without copyright or restrictions is some sort of hippie anti-business communism. when in truth, free media is a perfectly valid capitalist construct: it's just advertising for later capitalization on an advertising investment. an investment that for the internet is practically free
meanwhile, the recording industry, with copyrights, is not the vanguard of capitalism, its the vanguard of oligopoly, monopoly. history has shown that the greatest threat to a healthy capitalist market is not communism, but monopolies and oligopolies. it is in the name OF capitalism that you want to get away from intellectual property law
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
If this means no more Beyonce, Lady Gaga, and Jay-Z in every damn video then this is the greatest thing Google could have ever done with YouTube.
At heart, the synchronization rights comes from the basic copyright itself. The copyright holder has the statutory legal right to prohibit or authorize any particular use of the song. However, the copyright statute itself does not distinguish between whether the music is copied by itself or synchronized with a motion picture. Both are equally prohibited without the consent of the copyright holder.
Over the years, as publishers tried to maximize their earnings and simplify licensing procedures, they created the idea of synchronization rights, and wrote those into their licensing agreements. So, for example, anybody who pays appropriate fees to a licensing agency such as BMI or ASCAP is buying the right to play the songs they are licensed to provide, but when you read the fine print, you will see that the publisher/owner of the copyright is licensing, through ASCAP to you, only the right to play the song itself in your bar or wherever, not the right to do anything else with it. The license is carefully written to not grant you the license to do other things with the music, such as uploading it, redistributing it to others, or synchronizing it with a motion picture and using it for that purpose. To do that, they sell you a different license which DOES include the synchronization rights, but doesn't include stuff in the ASCAP license.
If your video doesn't contain the song "Eye of the Tiger", then your doing it wrong :).
http://www.turkeymonkey.com/2009/07/19/how-to-get-around-that-pesky-copyrighted-audio-filter-on-youtube-and-facebook/
While personally I'd consider a perceptual hash "known technology" and, at this point, fairly obvious, apparently Shazam has no problem threatening bloggers to sue them over it. So Google should be aware of this, and either preemptively counter-sue or get ready for battle.
Of course, maybe it's a subtle point, but question for the patent-knowledgeable: if they're using it internally to recognize posted tracks and not actually offering it as a public service, do they still need to respect the patent?
You mean recordings, not music. The signatures are those of known recordings. Google's search won't find your unauthorized performance of "Hard Day's Night"; it's searching sound, not notes.
Used to be -- radio stations popularized music. Of course, back then, radio didn't compete with much. Maybe a TV channel or two, or books.
There wasn't an "Internet", no "YouTube", people didn't have 20 to 200 channels of TV, and you couldn't go and rent movies.
In order to compete, radio station formats have changed. The stations have merged into large corporations, and, if a song isn't popular, it won't get played.
So, how does new music get promoted? In a word, it won't be. Unless there is distribution through TV (but, hey, the TV stations are pretty much owned by the same large corporations as additional assets), but that isn't likely.
Either ClearChannel/Chorus/... starts playing the new music that will influence, or they will fund formulaic music that they think will sell. So far, the formula wins.
Google filtering? Formulaic music and "classic rock" is quashed, but these are the formats that get radio play anyway. Independent music ends up being promoted, because that is the only music that won't be blocked. Classical can't be.
Anyone searching for music outside of the "new radio" will then get exposed to more independent and classical. It's all good.
I'm good with it.
Strangely enough, in my area, radio still seems viable (for me). Mostly "corporate radio", but we do have one jazz station (although they tend to stick with Ella Fitzgerald, etc. big name stuff) and one classical station (they tend to stick with light, popular classical, "your classical favorites"). I get CBC R1 and CBC R2 for a range of commentary. Suites me just fine. But that's four stations in a 6 million population area. Those are my "at work" choices.
When I get home (assuming this crackdown works out), I will be exposed to new and different musical material on the Internet.
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
any analogy fails to be 100% the same. you can always point to differences, the point of any analogy is not to be 100% the same
the point is to refute or underline a concept by pointing to a similarity with something else. the point here is the concept of giving something away for free, to generate exposure, which can later be turned into cash. that's a solid capitalist concept, not some hippie feel good "information wants to be free man"
and in this regard, my analogy is successful, and your nitpicking means nothing, because miss the whole goddamn point
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Nothing stops the artist from being self-published, and indeed the Internet has helped small artists get a broader audience.
Except, you know, the monopoly control of distribution channels. Digital distribution is starting to change that, but it has to fight the nearly unlimited resources the "traditional" media companies accumulated over the last few decades.
Having complete control over the distribution (and the advertising) means they have the artist by the balls, doesn't really matter what they agree to at that point.
sic transit gloria mundi
What's the alternative to "existing music" ... is it music that does not exist?
to see that someone (no idea who or where they are from) used one of my tracks on You Tube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYRWuYywqk0&feature=player_embedded#! So I don't get any money from it but I'm not losing any either. I don't want the DMCA and ACTA stifling my creativity!
http://www.acetonestudio.com
"Mute the video." LOL. Way to to, Einstein.