May 3, 2007
Policing Web Video With 'Fingerprints'
Can "fingerprinting" bring a truce to the Web's video-copyright wars? 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. The WSJ reports.
"The technology is based on the premise that any video content has unique attributes that allow it to be identified even from a short clip -- just as a human fingerprint identifies a person.
Proponents of fingerprinting technology say it can help spot TV shows and films that are posted on video-sharing sites such as Google Inc.'s YouTube without their owners' permission, so the sites can remove them or share advertising revenue.
... A series of legal, technical and financial issues remain to be solved even as video sites including Google, News Corp.'s MySpace Video and Microsoft Corp.'s Soapbox, amid pressure from media companies, are testing fingerprinting or putting it in place.
Google's YouTube every day takes in hundreds of thousands of video clips, from amateur pet videos to clips of commercial movies and TV shows, that are uploaded by consumers. The company has struck deals with some copyright holders, such as the United Kingdom's British Broadcasting Corp., to run their videos and share some ad revenue. And it says it will remove any content that is posted without the copyright holders' permission when it receives specific complaints.
But Google has said it needs media companies' involvement because on its own it can't distinguish between video that the copyright holders want posted and material posted without the owners' permission.
That's because Google doesn't know if the user uploading the video truly holds the copyright to a work or if the description the individual provides of the material is accurate. Some consumers, for example, spell the names of TV shows backward in the titles of pirated clips they upload in order to thwart detection by media companies.
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."
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