News: On Friday, Viacom and YouTube/Google had a scheduling conference in the Southern District of New York. The biggest news from the hearing was word from YouTube/Google’s lead counsel Philip S. Beck of Barlit Beck Herman Palenchar & Scott LLP about the video fingerprinting technology under works. YouTube already uses AudioMagic’s audio fingerprinting technology to help identify copied audio files. YouTube is developing similar kind of technology to recognize video file fingerprinting, with anticipated deployment around September.
“Somebody who has a copyrighted video … would provide it to us and say ‘we don’t want this up on YouTube.’ We’re developing a way to take basically an electronic or video or digital fingerprint of this material so that if somebody does try to upload it, within a minute or so the computers will figure out that that’s one of the items that the copyright owner said they don’t want up on the system, and we would be able to pull that down until any issues are resolved,” Beck said. (More here)
Analysis: It will be interesting to see what the Google guys cook up. People should be realistic, though, and not expect a foolproof system that will stop all copyright infringement. The open architecture of the Internet makes that virutally impossible.
August 1, 2007 at 7:00 am |
This has me worried. What about snippets from news broadcasts? Copyright law needs an overhaul ASAP.