YouTube Filtering Is On-Line 187
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.'"
Re:copyright holders aren't going to provide anyth (Score:3, Informative)
Re:copyright holders aren't going to provide anyth (Score:4, Informative)
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.