News: NBC, owned by Universal, will be testing out YouTube’s deployment of content-identication software (reportedly from Audible Magic out of Los Gatos, CA). According to WSJ:
“Fingerprinting technology, by analyzing the audio or video tracks of a clip, could alert YouTube to the presence of material that a media company has registered as its own — regardless of who uploads it or what they title the clip. General Electric Co.’s NBC-Universal says it plans to participate in a test of fingerprinting on YouTube that it expects to start shortly. Technical staffs from the two companies are working together and they hope to have results by this summer, according to NBC.”
Analysis: Glad to see the two sides working together to deal with copyright infringement. According to WSJ, the process will work something like this: “Google is expected to use fingerprinting to flag pirated clips to the content owners, which then have to request they be removed.” Of course, fingerprinting is a little bit short of automated filtering. WSJ: ‘It sounds like some kind of crazy lost and found,’ a senior executive at one of the big media companies says. ‘It’s not going to be enough,’ says another.” I guess I think everyone needs to be patient and give this technology a chance to develop.
Here’s how Audible Magic describes its own system: “Patented CopySense identification techniques recognize media content based on digital “fingerprints” derived from perceptual characteristics of the content itself. The approach is highly accurate and requires no dependence on metadata, watermarks or file hashes. Best of all the technology is highly immune to compression or distortion, and it is indifferent to file or streaming format. It’s the best approach for recognizing content “in the wild.” Integration of CopySense technology is made simple with an efficient and compact API library.”
