Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
you mean sort of a You-and-You-and-YouTube?
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...
There also needs to be a fair use option.
There is. If YouTube's Audible Magic server detects a match, it lists the video in Content ID Matches, where the uploader can file a dispute. One of the dispute options is "This use does not require the copyright owner's permission", such as fair use.
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.