YouTube's Content Identification Failure Raises Eyebrows

MSNBC is carrying a story looking at YouTube's failure to follow through with a promised 'content identification system' by the end of the year. The article goes on to discuss the possible impact this failure will have on the site's (so far) good relations with television, music, and movie studios. From the article: "If the delay lasts for more than a week or two into the new year, suggesting more than just a slight technical hitch, 'this is certainly going to be a serious issue', [Mike McGuire, a digital media analyst at Gartner] added. Leading music companies have already made clear they see completion of YouTube's anti-piracy technology as an important step in any closer co-operation. Failure to build adequate systems to protect copyright owners could also add to the risk of legal action against the site."

Something I noticed with Google Video

[shotgunefx]

Only one video I ever uploaded was not posted immediately. It was a demonstration of a touchscreen media player I'm working on (Was one of a couple vids I uploaded that night). I was playing copyrighted material in the demo, but no song played very long before moving on and the audio (as it was off camcorder) was horrible.

About 12 hours later, it cleared. Fairly certain it was flagged and reviewed. If that's the compromise, I think I could deal with that.

Re:No, it's not possible.

[jlarocco]

You have something better? MD5 is the easiest computationally and produces the smallest result to store, using other techniques will increase the size of your database and computational expense.

There's no way they could use MD5. MD5 hashes are designed to return the same value given the same input, and a totally different value for even a slight modification of the input. Or in other words, md5("ABCD") is nothing at all like md5("ABCE"). Given the nature of audio and video, it would be trivial to bypass an MD5 copyright check. Change a single pixel in a single frame from RGB(255,255,255) to RGB(255,255,254) and nobody would notice, and it'd get through the check.