YouTube launches new content-tracking tools

Was working today on a Variety piece about YouTube's new content filtering system, dubbed "Video ID." It's intended to help ferret out copyrighted content on the site, zapping it within minutes.

The story is here. Disney, Time Warner, and seven other media companies have been involved in beta-testing it. From the story:

“We are looking to build working relationships with media companies,” says David King, YouTube’s product manager, “to give the rights owners control, and to maximize their choices.” While YouTube has previously licensed technology from Audible Magic to look for infringing music on the site, it decided to build the Video ID service on its own.

You can see YouTube's sign-up page for the Video ID program right here.

CNET has a very good piece here. The Reuters story is here. The official Google blog entry is here.

What will be interesting is whether Google/YouTube considers this vast database of copyright content it is now building to be "proprietary." IE, this could become a major competitive advantage -- one that prevents other sites from effectively competing with YouTube. I asked King whether YouTube would consider making the database open to other video players, so that they could use it as a reference, as content was uploaded to their sites.

"Consistent with most Google products, we're building this with the idea of making it more generally available," Zahavah Levine, YouTube's general counsel, told me. "We would like to make it available to third-party sites."

That's a cool approach...we'll see how it plays out.

WSJ Profiles the YouTube Police

Phenomenal piece by Kevin Delaney in today's Wall Street Journal about the people paid to police YouTube for copyright infringement. (They work for a company called BayTSP.) They're trained to look for videos that are on the Billboard music charts, or content with the logo of a Viacom-owned network, among others. Wonder if they're trained at all in the concept of Fair Use?

Viacom apparently pays more than $100,000 a month to BayTSP to hunt down copyrighted clips and send take-down notices to YouTube.

From the piece:

BayTSP says it has more than five TV and movie-studio clients but for contractual reasons can't disclose names other than Viacom. The closely held company says it bills clients as much as $500,000 a month to track down illegal copies of software, music and video clips. Every month it sends out more than a million take-down notices.

Other companies have started using automated technology to identify video clips so they don't have to employ a room full of people manually scanning them as Bay TSP does. YouTube, which says it complies with copyright laws by removing clips when their owners request it, is testing technology to keep infringing videos off its site in the first place. BayTSP thinks human beings will always be needed if only to inspect automated results.

"There will always be something that falls into the gray area," says BayTSP CEO Mark Ishikawa, 42, who is also an active race-car driver. The company and Viacom have faced criticism for mistakenly requesting the takedown of noninfringing clips such as parodies and home videos, though BayTSP says its error rate on Web videos is only around 0.1%.

Google, Microsoft and Yahoo to Media Co's: Enough with the copyright warnings

Interesting new front in the copyright wars...

A group of tech and communication companies say that media companies are using copyright warnings to scare consumers, and they've just filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission, according to the NY Times. From the piece:

...[T[he group, the Computer and Communications Industry Association, said that the National Football League, Major League Baseball, NBC and Universal Studios, DreamWorks, Harcourt and Penguin Group display copyright warnings that are a “systematic misrepresentation of consumers’ rights to use legally acquired content.”

The complaint alleges that the warnings may intimidate consumers from making legal use of copyrighted material, like photocopying a page from a book to use in class.

“It is an attempt to convince Americans that they don’t have rights that they do in fact have,” said Ed Black, the association’s president and chief executive. “This is part of the larger context of what should be and what are proper rules for copyright in an Internet age.”

By September, YouTube Says It'll Start Blocking Copyrighted Uploads

From CNET's News.com:

YouTube will launch a system in September designed to prevent pirated material from going up on the site, a Google lawyer said in court on Friday.

Google, which acquired YouTube in October, plans to generate a library of digital video fingerprints that would be used by a computer system to screen clips being uploaded to YouTube, said Philip Beck, one of the attorneys representing Google and YouTube. Beck added that the screening process would take only a few minutes to determine whether a clip is copyright material.

That's the first time Google/YouTube have mentioned a firm date. But later, Google hedged in a statement, saying that the technology was complex, and "it's difficult to forecast specific launch dates."

Even more complex is the fact that it's legal to use portions of a copyrighted work -- say, a song or movie. That concept is called "fair use." But when even the US Copyright office concedes that the distinction between copyright infringement and fair use "may be unclear and not easily defined," how will Google figure it out? I'm expecting a lot of videos will be blocked if they contain a few seconds of a song or a snippet of a TV show, once this new software swings into action.

(Here's the AP/NYTimes coverage.)