Schmidt Says YouTube 'Very Close' to Filtering System

cnetfeed writes "Google CEO says an automated system will soon be available to track pirated content and prevent it from being uploaded to video sharing site. The system was supposed to be rolled out as early as last October, and the long delay in brining the technology online has resulted in ill will from companies like NBC and Viacom. 'Network executives accused Google of stalling so YouTube could reap the big traffic that professionally-created shows generate. Viacom filed a $1 billion lawsuit against Google last month and accused Google of massive intentional copyright infringement. "Ah Viacom," [CEO Eric Schmidt] Schmidt said. "You're either doing business with them or being sued by them...we chose the former, but ended up the latter." Schmidt took the opportunity to poke fun at Microsoft's assertion that Google's pending acquisition of DoubleClick may be a threat to fair competition. Other companies, including Yahoo and AT&T have also asked regulators to review the transaction closely.'"

Ode to Google

Google, google, what are we to think of you?

Once upon a time, you were the One True Search Engine. You wormed your way into our hearts with your blessed neutrality. You created cool toys, and you arbitrarily stood up for our rights when it suited your bottom line. You epitomized the .com boom. You were like the Switzerland of the internet.

Whereas Doubleclick stood for all that was wrong with making money, you stood as the shining beacon of how to do it with class.

And now? Forget it. Screw this whole "Don't be evil" thing, where the hell is the next paycheck coming from?

I wonder if AltaVista is still a decent search engine...

"Jump to conclusions" mat anyone?

Maybe Google can turn Doubleclick into a better company--who knows? I am not drawing any conclusions yet, I want to see what they do with it.

Re:"Jump to conclusions" mat anyone?

Erm, maybe after they've bought it (DoubleClick) they're going to fire (execute) all of their employees and burn their office to the ground?
And then, replace all of their adverts with Click On The Monkey ads where you really do win something if you Click On The Monkey.

I remember, back in the day, when banner adverts first started to proliferate and I actually tried to win something by clicking on the monkey...
I believe I won some malware.

J1M.

Re:Ode to Google

Doubleclick ads were going to be there, regardless of who owned it. Google wanted the user data that Doubleclick had collected over the years, and they didn't want Microsoft to be able to buy it. Therefore they overpaid by billions of dollars.

The outcome was binary - either Microsoft was going to own Doubleclick, or Google was. Given the choice, I would much rather see Google do it. After all - the worst case scenario is that Doubleclick ads persist as they are... with a decent chance that Google is going to do something productive with Doubleclick's business model.

All your videos are belong to us

End of Line

Hard AI ftw!

This is great! Google has automated a way to look at videos and determine if they match a video that's already in existence and under copyright! That means they've solved a hard AI problem. I hope some day they open source their solution.

ugh clear channel

Google is working with Clear Channel?

I feel sick..

The kind is dead, long live the king

I wonder who's gonna take over when YouTube went the way of Napster.

Anyone know? I'd love to know which shares to buy.

brining online

I ALWAYS brine online. It keeps the whole mess out of my kitchen!

and very close to losing its viewers

and $1.6b down the "tube" when the visitors abandon the site because they cannot get their favourite show
there is no brand loyalty on the Internet when it comes to video sharing sites, he who has the content wins
and with all the popular shows gone because of this ID system why bother using YouTube when there are hundreds of video sharing sites (many not based in the US) that dont employ these tactics ? want freedom ? simply dont use US based services

Re:and very close to losing its viewers

How many people really use YouTube as a way to get TV shows illegally? I wonder. Myself, I use YouTube to see unique stuff made by people with DV camcorders and such. If I want TV shows, I've got a DVR. If I want the MPAA drivel that passes for movies these days, there's Netflix and movies on iTunes (and the DVR). Who cares about illegal stuff on YouTube?

Still cracks me up

...Microsoft's assertion that Google's pending acquisition of DoubleClick may be a threat to fair competition...

Truth is funnier than fiction.

Brining

"...and the long delay in brining the technology online has resulted in ill will from companies like NBC and Viacom

brining
-noun
1. water saturated or strongly impregnated with salt.
2. a salt and water solution for pickling.
3. the sea or ocean.
4. the water of the sea.
5. Chemistry. any saline solution.
-verb (used with object)
6. to treat with or steep in brine.

Mmmmmm pickled technology.....

Dammit

swfdec [freedesktop.org] finally makes a free flash codec that can handle YouTube and the next day they announce all the good content is going away!

Wow ! AT&T is scared of "monopoly"

Good lord.

as if they werent the ones pulled stunts just a while ago, to be not a monopoly, but the sole controller of the greatest invention mankind ever had.

How could this possibly work?

I may be completley wrong, but here's how I understand this so far..

If we can discount anything that looks at the actual audio or video content of the upload, and I believe we can since there just isn't an AI out there which can conclusively pick (for example) Captain Picard out of a video clip, then this must somehow use the textual metadata hooked to it. It'll have to sift through the tags and descriptions put there by the uploader, or possibly contextual data from sites that later embed the clip.

That would open some new cans of worms, though. First, it'd be easy to defeat, as we learned back when the old Napster suddenly didn't have anything by "Metallica," but there were tons of new songs from "Metallika," "Mettalicca," and "Metalligreed." Second, what if I record, say, a "C.S.I." parody? By rights I should be allowed to post it as such, will my file get flagged as lawsuit-bait and zapped because I used a copyrighted term in the description? What if I post an original film about firefighters that happens to use the word "heroes" in the title, which has nothing to do with the copyrighted TV series "Heroes?"

hashes and fingerprinting technology anyone?

For most of the videos, the following could easily be done...

Copyright holder notices a video that they hold the copyright to. They tell Google. Google checks the claims made, etc. etc. and presumably finds it valid. They make a hash of the video. They check their site for any other videos that match that hash, and remove those as well. They check any future upload and see if it matches the hash - if it does, it doesn't post it.

That leaves people getting around that by re-encoding, etc.

So in comes fingerprinting:
    http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=video+fingerp rint [google.com]

It's not exactly rocket science. Re-encode it? Zap a few frames? Fingerprinting tech laughs in the face of that sort of thing. The only two effective means of fooling fingerprinting tech are:
1. mangle the video so it can't possibly be recognized. Unfortunately, this means nobody can watch it without a special de-mangling player.
2. find out how the fingerprinting tech works, and make sure that only in those spots where it checks the original video, there's a difference. Of course any fingerprinting tech worth it's $$,$$$ will allow a seed value to change things around, and google rotates this once a week or however often needed once they realize people are getting around things in that way - and punish those users appropriately.

Not saying I agree with them doing it - though I find it hilarious in a sad way that if a copyright holder says "X is mine, please take it offline", that Google will do so - but not on Y which is the exact same video, or Z which is the exact same video getting uploaded a day later - but those are the ways they -can- do it.

I don't think anybody is suggesting that Google build an AI system that magically determines whether the copyright of a video lays with a third party and by means of technological ESP determines that said copyright holder did not consent to the upload - and I certainly don't think that Google is claming that they are either.

Neat...

So when the title says,"Paris Hilton rides tractor doggy style!" and we get some video about a dog that can fetch mixed in with episodes of the Simpsons it will automatically pull the video?

Oh the wonders of technology...

[J]

Pirated Content

There needs to be a real discussion about copyright and fair use by the feds, hopefully SCOTUS. I don't see how a low resolution clip of "needs more cowbell" from SNL constitutes piracy.

Similarly, I don't torrent movies because I know that's infringement but I have NO problem downloading ANY over the air TV show that I want to watch (lost, 24, etc) even though I know that in the current framework that is considered to be infringing.

Possible application for this technology

If one can identify whether two streams are similar or not then people won't have to watch the same porn twice!!! Once again google gets close to geeks' hearts.

Don't care how they "figured it out" just...

If this affects music videos from the 80s, I guess I'll just have to stop going to Youtube. People with webcams just get tedious after a while. It's back to watching VH1 Classics on the weekends and fast forwarding through Musical Youth and Big Country.

Bad move

This would seem to work against their claims of safe harbor under the DMCA, since a plaintiff could argue that with this system, Google should generally be aware of a particular instance of copyrighted material. Ignorance actually is an excuse in this case, and Google would have been much better off handling DMCA takedown requests rather than trying to resolve the problem themselves.

The existence of the technology is interesting

given that Google has a pretty strong defense in the DMCA safe harbor provisions.

In fact, experimenting with such technology is legally risky. Already according to TFA studios are accusing Google of "Dragging its feet" in deploying the technology, in other words knowingly letting pirated content to be posted for its own benefit. I still think they're probably within safe harbor, but they're skirting the edge.

Personally, I don't think Google needs to lift a finger in this direction. Safe harbor describes exactly what they have to do to be safe, and exactly the mechanisms the studios need to police their own content.

Either (a) Google is developing this technology simply because it can (possible) or (b) they have some other plan for YouTube that involves placating the studios (likely). I know people like to say that YouTube is, essentially, video blogging. There's no denying that that is an important application. But I'm thinking Google has ideas for other, commercial services built on top of, or integrated with it.

And then there is all that dark fiber they have been buying... Put them together and you have a company that looks like it is positioning itself to do to TV what TV did to the movies. Maybe.

Has there ever been a company more fun to speculate about than Google?

Video Cops

Well...we could always just read a book. It seems the content owners don't understand the network economy.

What about the other way around?

OK, so the big studios are constantly pressuring Google to reign in their step-child video service.. When will YouTube/Google turn around and say, "Ok, when will the news (for lack of a better term) companies you own start paying us for broadcasting the clips they swipe from our site?". I can't count the number of times I have seen something on CNN, Fox, The Daily Show, or another reliable news source use a YouTube clip to spark up a story. Are they paying residuals to YouTube?

robot police and false positives

there is a reason why we dont tolerate robot police, robotic judges, or robotic jurors.

robots are incapable of human perception, flexibility, or personal discression.

every filtering system throughout history has produced false positives, especially egregious ones in the computer field.

this leads to inflexible censorship and "great firewall of china" style repression of free speech.

they did this with google video, and lost out to youtube, and when they do it to youtube theyll lose out to the next guy.

congrats google, you've flushed your montra of "do no evil" down the proverbial johnny cash.

YouTube: the new "broadcast" medium

Instead of filtering out their content, they should get a cut. Big Media is terrified of YouTube, because they misunderstand it's opportunity. YouTube is the newest form of broadcasting. It brings together everything to make a new kind of "TV" or "Radio" that is all-immersive. With Google behind it, YouTube potentially brings hyper-targeted advertising to the table.

Video, especially with modern desktop tools, is highly plastic. You learn to edit by cutting other's material and your own. Rappers and hip-hop do it, too. This is a proving ground for everyone to make media with. YouTube has a certain momentum behind it, and this is a fair-use issue in many instances (fan vids, AMVs, etc). Google is testing revenue sharing now with the Diet Coke & Mentos guys. YouTube will eventually have across-the-board revenue sharing with users and Big Media should co-opt this instead of getting into a urination match with the big G.

Users will continue to upload copywritten content. The technology is almost available to make everyone happy with this. For copywrite holders, this brings your content more "face time", more exposure, more people talking about it. This is a good thing for you.

One last point for all involved: the next form of advertising will be extensive product placement in Internet video, coupled with Adwords campaigns by same sponsors. It will probably be combined with locational services. This will be a huge driver for both specialty and mass market products.

Example, from 3-4 years ahead: you watch a video that combines Bruce Lee's famous nunchaku scene with segments from a content provider's instructional video. In the Adwords sidebar you get the click-thru for that video's site and to the film collection of Bruce Lee. Also, on a time/use/flat-fee basis, the copyright holder of the Bruce Lee material gets a cut. Decentralized as this could be, it gives a simple clearing-house for stock videos as well.

Josh

The gateway to the memory hole....

Now when politicians get caught saying things on camera and later say the exact opposite, the previous statement can be purged from YouTube permanently (and automatically).

Just what our cloak-and-dagger government needs.... more cloak.

Youtube soon to close

As soon as that filter is in place, who really wants to watch videos of 10 year olds harassing their dog.

Why it took so long

From TFA:

"The long delay in brining the technology to market was due to the necessity of hiring thousands of new federal judges to rule on whether or not new uploads are fair use (parodies, short excerpts, etc) in real time. "

Wow! Google invents mindreading technology!

So, Google has invented a system that can read my mind and analyze all the content surrounding a particular video clip to determine with 100% accuracy whether my usage of said clip constitutes fair use or not? That is some serious technology!

I'm impressed that I'll be able to use that Disney clip loaded to Google Video that is embedded in my blog on a completely different site for my college research paper on Disney's history of copyright violations.

Chainletters

Now, if they'd only make an automated function that rooted out all the chainletters and spam, I'd be a really happy camper.

Viacom's lawyers will sue them anyway

To recoup lost income.