YouTube Filtering Is On-Line

ghostcorps writes "After months of promises to IP-holders, the long-awaited filters system for YouTube has gone online. The new system will make it easier, the company claims, for copyrighted clips to be removed. 'YouTube now needs the cooperation of copyright owners for its filtering system to work, because the technology requires copyright holders to provide copies of the video they want to protect so YouTube can compare those digital files to material being uploaded to its website. This means that movie and TV studios will have to provide decades of copyright material if they don't want it to appear on YouTube, or spend even more time scanning the site for violations.'"

perks of the job

a few weeks ago the poll was what perks do google get, well now we know:

unlimited copyright tape library.

Sergey and Larry must have a lot of popcorn.

Re:perks of the job

You got me thinking about that. If Google were to mark the videos they use with copyright dates, the videos given to them by copyright holders, they could effectively know when the copyright ends on a particular work. This would allow them to then upload a video the day the copyright ends, thus having easy access to once copyrighted stuff. Google could future proof itself and have free information to make available to the public first.

Re:Opt Out!?

Actually, its already opt-in.

I have to opt-in to create an account to upload stuff.
I have to confirm I have licenses for the data I am uploaded (it is mentioned in the T&Cs of your youtube account).

If there is something wrong the copyright holder should go after the uploader not the site.

B. You shall be solely responsible for your own User Submissions and the consequences of posting or publishing them. In connection with User Submissions, you affirm, represent, and/or warrant that: you own or have the necessary licenses, rights, consents, and permissions to use and authorize YouTube to use all patent, trademark, trade secret, copyright or other proprietary rights in and to any and all User Submissions to enable inclusion and use of the User Submissions in the manner contemplated by the Website and these Terms of Service.

http://youtube.com/t/terms [youtube.com]

It's A Shame They Won't Take the Offer

What I found most interesting comes from the beta announcment [youtube.com]:

Copyright holders can choose what they want done with their videos: whether to block, promote, or even--if a copyright holder chooses to partner with us--create revenue from them, with minimal friction. YouTube Video ID will help carry out that choice.

Because I'm certain Google realizes that a lot of these copyright holders are sittin' on a freaking gold mine here.

I guess that's the sad thing though, it's no longer the people that made this stuff that own the copyrights. It's huge corporations. This goes for sound and video. Do you think any of the big studios care about artist exposure? They don't care about building a fan base, they care about profit margins.

I personally would like to see Google help users approach and push the limits of fair use of sound and video. I think that a lot of artists would be open to their work being displayed in a tasteful manner without the full work being put online. I also think that the usually low quality of YouTube is a good reason to allow this and that if copyright material is found, they should investigate either shortening it or degrading the quality so that viewers get a taste. What's more, putting a link to sales of the item would be basically free advertising.

I feel especially sorry for the people who build movie montages with unpopular songs [youtube.com] for I have watched many of them and purchased a DVD & CD from seeing the two. After watching that particular video, I rediscovered the genius of Sergio Leone after a fan posted that video with one of my favorite bands, The Arcade Fire. Sure, it's just anecdotal evidence but I still view that as original art & innovative.

It's truly a shame that copyright holders are throwing away what could be a beautiful & profitable relationship with fans.

Yay

One step down the path for Google to catalog every movie ever made, and provide live streaming of any movie you want direct to your home!

How easy is circumvention?

Presumably they are creating fingerprints from the original material and comparing those against uploads. It would be interesting to know how well this copes with different codecs and frame rate changes.

Or do they wait for the uploads to be flagged as infringing and then do a dumb binary compare to prevent deleted files being uploaded again.

Circumvention Ideas

1. A filter that shifts 70% of pixels one pixel to the left.

2. A filter that munges the rows of pixels around the frame area, distorting the video fingerprint without affecting viewing quality.

3. A filter that randomly inserts the Goatse man for a Fight Club-like single frame.

4. A utility that uploads the clip backwards, and then a browser-player that automatically time-remaps it forward for playback.

5. A watermarking process designed to distort the video fingerprint while remaining invisible to non-AI viewers.

Okay now -- code it.

Re:Circumvention Ideas

I've actually written a video comparison utility, and it would have neatly ignored every single one of these (with the exception of "backwards", which would have taken about five more minutes of work - it wasn't really important in my case.) Video is an interesting case because it's already so damaged by the very nature of compression, your tester has to be very lax to catch anything - but on the other hand, there's so much data that it's easier than you'd think to match up. Especially if you're willing to toss borderline cases at human checkers - you honestly end up with surprisingly few of those.

I don't know what Google is doing along these lines, though.

Re:Circumvention Ideas

Yes, but given the quality of the previous fingerprinting, all those tricks are likely to work.

One video my, er, friend was uploading (that's my story and I'm sticking to it) was removed from youtube. He tried uploading it again and it didn't even go up, it was just immediately rejected. Out comes the hex editor and he changed the last byte to something else and reuploaded. It worked like a peach, like they were just doing checksums on the upload. *rollseyes*

For how long their fingerprinting has been in the making, one can only hope it's as functional as your comparison utility.

Add my vote for:
a1) chroma-shifting during encode
a2) video rotated 180 degrees, to be corrected with nvidia's nview "rotate monitor"
a3) odd, non-standard framerates (27 fps, etc)

Re:Circumvention Ideas

How about subtly shifting each pixel one pixel in a random direction (ensuring that they all end up heading in the same direction for any particular frame) and then making each pixel a slightly different color shade, you'd have to accept a good number of false positives to be able to catch videos in a different location with different colors than the original.

Dead easy to spot. Ever heard of sift descriptors? They're fast to compute, and you only need one or two per frame to be able to uniquely fingerprint a video in a way that's totally resistant to rotation, recolouring, frame rate changes, and most of the other (lame) circumvention techniques suggested in this discussion.

Remember folks

Fair use is only a defense to the use of copyrighted material. It is not a right you can assert.

copyright holders aren't going to provide anything

copyright holders aren't going to provide decades of anything since it's up to google to keep copyrighted content off youtube. no reason why a copyright holder needs to go through this when someone else is infringing on their rights

Re:copyright holders aren't going to provide anyth

copyright holders aren't going to provide decades of anything since it's up to google to keep copyrighted content off youtube. no reason why a copyright holder needs to go through this

You mean, other than the DMCA, which says it's the copyright holders' responsibility to do so?

It's the law. It's not up to the copyright holders to dictate anything to Google. If they want their stuff off of YouTube, they need to police their own content.

And this was no accident, either - the law was written this way specifically anticipating cases like this. (Ok, they thought at the time that it was telecom companies who would be most affected, but the result is the same.) The point being that if service providers were forced to police the content on their networks on a continuous basis, it wouldn't be worth it for any of them to be in business. So they lobbied for this provision of the DMCA, and copyright owners acquiesced, knowing that on balance, the DMCA was a huge win for them.

They can't go back now and whine about the fact that they don't like the compromise that they agreed to, and which was the only way they got the DMCA passed in the first place. Unless that was their strategy to begin with - accept the compromise to get the DMCA passed, knowing they'd just pay off congress to amend it later - and I wouldn't put that past them.

But what choice did they have?

There's no other way to automagically scan all submitted videos and decide whether they are copyrighted or not. Only by having a set of material thats deemd 'copyrighted' to compare against can a given clip be tagged as legal or not.

It seems like the best solution to a practically impossible problem.

How does it work?

How exactly will this work? Do the copy write holders upload their files and google analyzes them and compares them to uploaded files by its user base? If an uploaded file meets a specific threshold does it remove the file? What about parts of a show? If Fox uploads a 30 min episode of Family Guy and someone uploads a 5 min clip how is that handled. Also I thought you could use up to 30 seconds of a video/commercial/show etc. with out getting in trouble or does that just apply to educational use?

Rubbish

Copyright owners don't need to provide "decades of copyrighted material".

The system will help with reuploads. This means, when a video is marked as pirated, the system will be able to recognize the duplicates and mark them for removal.

This means companies don't need to track the duplicates manually any more but just point to a single sample.

Thin cover?

Given varying levels of capture quality and compression, I think this is always going to be a sticky situation. I wonder if the filtering technology can identify partial clips of a copyrighted work and flag those as well.

My real curiosity though, is if Google/YouTube might be trying to build a huge searchable library of video media, as they already did with the books project, and this is a way to sort of lure the content providers in. I'd love to see what kind of license the content providers are extending to Youtube in providing this material.

Can we get the HAHAHAHA tag now

Google finds a way that is only minimally less painful for the **AA to protect their copywrited works, and in turn gets original copies of all of them. I just know this made the **AA truly happy.

Cuban said anyone that bought youtube was a fool, wonder what he thinks about this move?

It sounds to me like the **AA will be hiring in their IT departments soon.. anyone need a job?

so when will youtube's bitrate improve?

It's a great service and all but I'd like to see these videos at a higher encode rate. (yes, I'm spoilt).

On a side note...

On a side note, they could work out those small bugs first, now couldn't they? Like, clicking on a thumbnai and then finding out it's been removed? Well then why include that result in the search anyway?
Doesn't bother first, but gets really annoying afterwards.
Also, isn't youtube so popular just because of all thr material they're going to remove? Who wants to watch some emos bitching about their day? (Those who want are probably on Myspace anyway).

Well, yeah

This means that movie and TV studios will have to provide decades of copyright material if they don't want it to appear on YouTube, or spend even more time scanning the site for violations

But at least they can!

How do you prove you own copyright?

Having seen a few stories on this today the thing I still don't understand is how the 'true' copyright holders are identified to start with? What stops Joe Blogs uploading Spiderman 3 and claiming he created it and wants a cut of the revenue?

Or is this aimed solely at the 'megacorps' and not actually a wonderful means of sharing the wealth etc... (On the whole I like the pitch, and if they have a good answer to this problem, it generally sounds like a move the right way - assuming content providers take it up).

All material

because the technology requires copyright holders to provide copies of the video they want to protect

Wait. That means google will pretty soon have almost ALL COPYRIGHTED MEDIA in its servers?
I, for one, welcome our new media-holding overlords.
There's a lot of money to be made with this material, besides searching youtube. Even without releasing it.

Not too bad

Obviously no company is going to actually go through and send google videos of all the stuff they want to protect, but what they CAN do is identify the videos already on gootube that need to be removed as copyrighted, so they can just use the offending videos as the sample to scan for. Prevent the same video clips from ending up online over and over again.

What a scam!

Pretty funny that google is trying to con people into building a digital library for them.

Think about how much google has spend just trying to build a library of books, and now they're getting people to build them a media library for free!

Danger, Fair use!

There are a lot of Anime Music Videos in there. I fear the artists (either greedy japanese companies or greedy RIAA members) will want to take them off.

But then again, I haven't RTFA so I don't know WTF is Youtube Filtering :P

Another Site With Automated Content Filtering

You might have missed out on imeem.com [imeem.com] or at least ignored them ever since they changed from being a client/IM based p2p network to being a social media site about 2 years ago. But for the last 6 months they've been using automated content filtering for the music that people are posting to the site. Some of the people who register their content are have deals with imeem which allows the free sharing of their music - labels like Warners, Sony, BMG, Nettwerk, Beggars etc etc, and of course there are a few labels who have their tracks reduced to 30 second samples.

It should be noted that imeem announced all its big deals after turning its system on so presumably the content identification system helped make those media deals possible.

Fair Use

How are they going to handle fair use? MY guess: they won't. Your Steamboat Willie parody is not going to be allowed on Youtube.

I wonder how long it will take for the first software to come out that alters vidoes just enough to evade detection...

Video IQ

Other than the sheer scale problem, couldn't a company just run the video through an identification program to ID the actors in the video, cross reference it with an imdb type database with both movies/shows and actors video IQ profile? Couple this with video fingerprinting to dispose of copies. Add in a system to freeze the offending video and allow the user who uploaded to be able to contest the infringement?

this is going to be a field day for lawyers

this is going to be a field day for lawyers

GoogleTV

A number of pundits out there said that GoogleTV would never fly, but now we know how they're going to get all of those video clips online. Man, Google is pretty smart!

http://youtube.com/watch?v=J9SK_M_nVWA [youtube.com]

Copyright claims

I have come across an instance of youtube deleting hundreds of newsreel films from an account which were public domain for over 60 years.

Maybe youtube should spend some time on finding out if the items they delete are actually in copyright first before deleting them, in addition to spending time on this system.

Do no evil, indeed.

...just aid and abet Highly Concentrated Forms of Evil, instead.

(Disclaimer: this post is a wake-up call to all who labor underneath naive good/evil views of corporate entities. I do not subscribe to such infantile views myself.)

Do they have to provide the movie or a hash?

Do the copyright owners have to provide the entire damn clip to Google? Or just buy the hash/indexer too from Google, run it through their materials in their secure facility and give Google just the hash data base?

I'll gladly do this too.

Hey, RIAA, please send me all your original media and I'll make sure there are no shared copies of any of it in my collection ;-)

Full copies are unnecessary

Technically speaking, one wouldn't need to provide google with copies of all infringing video. Youtube could give copyright holders a tool that would create signatures for their media. Then they'd have to give the signatures to Google. If the signature generation algorithm is mildly clever then basic artifacts like frame rate, resolution, and timing should not pose a problem to the detection routine. More cleverness in the algorithm could catch more deliberate circumvention attempts.

Video is only half the story

The sound track is probably easier to check and we're *much* more sensitive to changes made there, leaving very little wiggle room for deception.

Public Domain

This way, Google will be able to build a large library of copyrighted movies that will become public in 60 years, or when the copyright holder disappears. That's far sighted, if Google supposes that it will remain in business at this time !

Google Motto

What happened to the old Google motto? "Don't be evil." Oh wait they gave that up long ago. Am I the only person who thinks Google's grown too large lately and should be split up. They're worse than Microsoft now. They have their fingers in everyone's pies. Search, online work collaboration, email, maps, digital video, and so on...

Jihad on YouTube

I just wish YouTube would 'filter' out Jihadi videos... But they haven't/won't, because its Constitutionally protected 'free speech' for a foreign based terrorist organization to recruit online (I'm sure the ACLU and CAIR will take any cases pro-bono)...

Decades?

This means that movie and TV studios will have to provide decades of copyright material if they don't want it to appear on YouTube, or spend even more time scanning the site for violations.

Given the amount of work that would entail, I doubt they will provide "decades" worth of comparison files -- they will likely concentrate on recent and/or popular (i.e., majorly profitable) material. NBC may well want to prevent "Heroes" from turning up on YouTube, but something tells me they aren't going into the archives to provide "fingerprints" of "Supertrain" or "Hello, Larry" or the Jean Doumanian era of SNL. (Well, in the latter case they might wish to keep those shows off YT out of sheer embarassment....)

I Wonder...

I wonder if I inverted the image (rotated it 180 degrees), if the copyright filter would catch me. Turn your monitor 180 degrees to watch, or have a small app to flip the viewer's screen.

Next months healine

Next months healine: YouTube Hacked Headline 2 Months from now: All copyrighted material ever created available via Kazaa.

and then...

and the material would be available at the stroke of a keyboard. It would be inevitable if Youtube has the material that it will end up available online. YouTube (Google) is positioning itself as the "channel" of the Internet. Part of what they will eventually offer, IMHO, is micro-payments based on viewership. To them, it doesn't matter if it's Gone With the Wind or home-cam video, it's just content. That sort of situation is win-win for the studios. Their next trick will be offering the studios some kind of cut of user-edited videos based on percentage of each copyright holder's material. This would allow users to remix video at will and everyone gets a fair cut of advertising dollars. YouTube benefits from having even more content and a provides a fair playing field for all involved.

On an artistic note, people need material to practice video editing. Being able to recut shots from other projects is a valuable learning experience. Every Naruto fan-vid on YouTube is someone learning to edit.

Josh

Media Companies-- be careful what you ask for...

What I like most about this scheme is that in order for it to work, it puts a huge onus on the copyright owners to proactively register their works with Google now, to an extent they probably didn't even have to with the US Copyright office. They can no longer complain to Google for lack of protection if they are too lazy to upload everything they own (and for most of the big majors, that's a lot of stuff). This lets Google off the hook and simplifies the takedown process for them, while giving the big media companies essentially what they asked for:

Google as new Copyright registrar. I love it!

With regards to matching-- I agree that accurate matching is probably not all that hard, you could probably reduce everything to 32x32 64 color pixels sampled @ 1 fps and fuzzy match the results and identify the vast majority of stuff-- and let humans check for false positives if necessary-- you could immediately have the system put a vid on "suspension" if it looks to be infringing until an eyeball gets the chance to look at it to confirm. Though I would guess that false positives could be pretty darn rare so that may not even be necessary. Things like uploading copyrighted vids backwards won't be useful to most people but could be included in the match anyway if it was a problem. Even completely shuffling the frame positions of the entire video may not be a good workaround, as you could sort the frames in some way and then compare them, then try them inverted or flipped or shifted-- the worst these operations might do in the long run is cause the matching algorithm to run longer as it tries more and more permutations that one might apply to the content...

On the other hand, Google may have to periodically rerun all the original content through their fingerprinting algorithm to regenerate the database as they tune up its accuracy, which given a huge database of registered works could end up being a resource consuming enterprise...

Hello everybody out there using youtube -

I'm doing a (free) video content management system (just a hobby, won't be big and
professional like google video) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing
since july, and is starting to get ready. I'd like any feedback on
things people like/dislike in youtube, as my CMS resembles it somewhat
(same logical layout of the web frontend (due to practical reasons)
among other things).

I've currently converted "britney_nackt_xxx.xvid" and "on-night-in-paris.wmv", and things seem to work.
This implies that I'll get something practical within a few months, and
I'd like to know what features most people would want. Any suggestions
are welcome, but I won't promise I'll implement them

                                JoSch ([e-mail])

PS. Yes - it's free of any youtube code, and it has a multi-threaded encoding process.
It is NOT protable (uses a perl lib only in ubuntu 7.10 etc), and it probably never
will support anything other than porn, as that's all I have :-(.

( trac at http://mister-muffin.de/proj [mister-muffin.de] )

Please use an alternative to youtube. Censorship

Youtube may have been first but their video is crap. It's very pixelated.

Censorship on youtube is growing. You can't comment anymore on controversial subjects: No more immediate posting of comments. It's crap. Don't even get me started on 'no commentable' videos.

Also what about the phony fake actors thinking it's their ticket to fame.

And the crappy videos everywhere that have no purpose but SPAM.

Youtube sucks. Please use an Alternative like Blip.tv or Stage6. Both are better quality also.

Problem solved

"Hello, YouTube? Yes, hi. This is NBC. We're sending you a live, real-time feed of all the material we consider copyrighted. It's called Channel 4."

Naruto

Hopefully this will mean the 8 million Narutp videos will vanish from YT.

Who will visit?

Who will visit youtube when all that's on it are adolescent pranks shot on cellphones?

music

i am going to start an audio posting site, in order to ensure my users do not violate copyright law i am requesting all music labels to submit to me their entire catalog in electronic form for the purpose of building an automated filter.

Sometimes the Children Pay

In the Video "Grove Tube" there is a public service announcement about the problems of Venereal Diseases. I firmly believe that this movies message of such a public problem is a shame to loose under the copy write banner. Can someone point me to an anchor that has this important message? Please?

Two problems

1) this new copyright protection system is easily circumvented by altering one pixel of one frame in the video, making it pointless and a waste of time 2) assuming big companies do provide the "decades of material", what happens if Youtube gets hacked?

Re:Almost brilliant

They should put some fine print that says google is allowed to use the uploaded sample content however it sees fit, including distributing it freely ;)

Re:Almost brilliant

how the fuck else do you suggest they do it? defending copyrights has ALWAYS been up to the holder, not the rest of us.

Re:Almost brilliant

I think you'll find copyright holders are far too busy posting broken torrents to piratebay. They simply don't have time to trawl youtube as well surely.