Schmidt Says YouTube 'Very Close' to Filtering System 108
cnetfeed writes "Google CEO says an automated system will soon be available to track pirated content and prevent it from being uploaded to video sharing site. The system was supposed to be rolled out as early as last October, and the long delay in brining the technology online has resulted in ill will from companies like NBC and Viacom. 'Network executives accused Google of stalling so YouTube could reap the big traffic that professionally-created shows generate. Viacom filed a $1 billion lawsuit against Google last month and accused Google of massive intentional copyright infringement. "Ah Viacom," [CEO Eric Schmidt] Schmidt said. "You're either doing business with them or being sued by them...we chose the former, but ended up the latter." Schmidt took the opportunity to poke fun at Microsoft's assertion that Google's pending acquisition of DoubleClick may be a threat to fair competition. Other companies, including Yahoo and AT&T have also asked regulators to review the transaction closely.'"
Ode to Google (Score:2, Insightful)
Once upon a time, you were the One True Search Engine. You wormed your way into our hearts with your blessed neutrality. You created cool toys, and you arbitrarily stood up for our rights when it suited your bottom line. You epitomized the .com boom.
You were like the Switzerland of the internet.
Whereas Doubleclick stood for all that was wrong with making money, you stood as the shining beacon of how to do it with class.
And now? Forget it. Screw this whol
"Jump to conclusions" mat anyone? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:"Jump to conclusions" mat anyone? (Score:5, Funny)
And then, replace all of their adverts with Click On The Monkey ads where you really do win something if you Click On The Monkey.
I remember, back in the day, when banner adverts first started to proliferate and I actually tried to win something by clicking on the monkey...
I believe I won some malware.
J1M.
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Not that I'm complaining...
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In any case, isn't it a bad sign when the first post exceeds the length of the article discussing the subject matter?
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Whereas Doubleclick stood for all that was wrong with making money, you stood as the shining beacon of how to do it with class. And now? Forget it. Screw this whole "Don't be evil" thing, where the hell is the next paycheck coming from? I wonder if AltaVista is still a decent search engine...
Absolutely nothing else needs to be said here. Doubleclick is one of the many scourges out on the net and Google wants to buy them? There is a serious conflict of interest there if Google still means to "do no evil". But we all know that Google didn't really mean that when they said it. It was just part of their marketing machine.
Re:Ode to Google (Score:5, Insightful)
The outcome was binary - either Microsoft was going to own Doubleclick, or Google was. Given the choice, I would much rather see Google do it. After all - the worst case scenario is that Doubleclick ads persist as they are... with a decent chance that Google is going to do something productive with Doubleclick's business model.
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All your videos are belong to us (Score:2)
Hard AI ftw! (Score:5, Funny)
Also a serious data processing problem (Score:1)
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1) use a hash function that is not very sensitive to slight changes, such as those that come from different compression formats, slight changes in overall color or audio levels, etc. This will generate a lot of hash overlaps. But thats ok, because you dont use a single hash per video. Instead, you...
2) hash small overlapping time segments, perhaps one second each with 9/10 overlap so 10 second video has 100 hash numbers. In this case, you would use interpolation when the time resolution is low
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One interesting thing to use, might be the audio track as audio fingerprinting has been around for a while now. Just search the audio track for the theme song and presto you have a possible way to flag files.
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Once on a slow friday afternoon at a company I used to work for we started trying to pick obscure songs for it to identify. I think it got them all with the exception of some 'world music' african drum thing.
Then we had the idea of playing two songs together. So the text comes in and idents one of the songs correctly, a few seconds later, another text with the second. Clever stuff.
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No. Google has an automated copyright checker, but there's no word on how good it is. They're doing this simply to shield themselves from lawsuits. It only has to be good enough for Google to to be able to argue they've gone above and beyond and expended every reasonab
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ugh clear channel (Score:4, Insightful)
I feel sick..
The kind is dead, long live the king (Score:2)
Anyone know? I'd love to know which shares to buy.
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brining online (Score:2, Funny)
and very close to losing its viewers (Score:4, Insightful)
and $1.6b down the "tube" when the visitors abandon the site because they cannot get their favourite show
there is no brand loyalty on the Internet when it comes to video sharing sites, he who has the content wins
and with all the popular shows gone because of this ID system why bother using YouTube when there are hundreds of video sharing sites (many not based in the US) that dont employ these tactics ? want freedom ? simply dont use US based services
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Re:and very close to losing its viewers (Score:5, Insightful)
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I'm sure that Viacom probably already knows this. However, not only can they run a lawsuit based around the fact that the pirated stuff is making Google
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How in hell is Viacom a middleman? They produce an absolute shitload of TV shows, movies and other media...hardly a middleman. Calling them a middleman implies they don't do anything much at all.
they are pissed that they are doing this more often then they are watching Viacom's sponsored programming.
But they're not. People's h
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That's not actually true. What _is_ true is that in most parts of the world you can't see any other shows but the professionally produced ones. There simply is no alternative because the television industry is expensive to join and be part of.
What's interesting is that for the _very_ small number (in
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Not just full TV shows. (Score:2)
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How many people really use YouTube as a way to get TV shows illegally? I wonder. Myself, I use YouTube to see unique stuff made by people with DV camcorders and such.
Do you really? Most of that is highly derivative crap, IMO. The one or two per week that are actually watchable I'll catch. The rest of the time I use YouTube to search for old-ass things like '80s videos or clips of ancient cartoons, or to stream-of-conciousness through clips of concert DVDs, or to watch clips of standups. All of which is c
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Viva Europa!
Still cracks me up (Score:2)
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Brining (Score:2, Informative)
brining
-noun
1. water saturated or strongly impregnated with salt.
2. a salt and water solution for pickling.
3. the sea or ocean.
4. the water of the sea.
5. Chemistry. any saline solution.
-verb (used with object)
6. to treat with or steep in brine.
Mmmmmm pickled technology.....
Dammit (Score:4, Informative)
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Wow ! AT&T is scared of "monopoly" (Score:2)
as if they werent the ones pulled stunts just a while ago, to be not a monopoly, but the sole controller of the greatest invention mankind ever had.
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There, corrected it for you. If we are going to make extreme generalizations, at least let's do it right,
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internet is the greatest invention since the dawn of civilization.
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How could this possibly work? (Score:5, Insightful)
If we can discount anything that looks at the actual audio or video content of the upload, and I believe we can since there just isn't an AI out there which can conclusively pick (for example) Captain Picard out of a video clip, then this must somehow use the textual metadata hooked to it. It'll have to sift through the tags and descriptions put there by the uploader, or possibly contextual data from sites that later embed the clip.
That would open some new cans of worms, though. First, it'd be easy to defeat, as we learned back when the old Napster suddenly didn't have anything by "Metallica," but there were tons of new songs from "Metallika," "Mettalicca," and "Metalligreed." Second, what if I record, say, a "C.S.I." parody? By rights I should be allowed to post it as such, will my file get flagged as lawsuit-bait and zapped because I used a copyrighted term in the description? What if I post an original film about firefighters that happens to use the word "heroes" in the title, which has nothing to do with the copyrighted TV series "Heroes?"
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hashes and fingerprinting technology anyone? (Score:5, Insightful)
Copyright holder notices a video that they hold the copyright to. They tell Google. Google checks the claims made, etc. etc. and presumably finds it valid. They make a hash of the video. They check their site for any other videos that match that hash, and remove those as well. They check any future upload and see if it matches the hash - if it does, it doesn't post it.
That leaves people getting around that by re-encoding, etc.
So in comes fingerprinting:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=video+finger
It's not exactly rocket science. Re-encode it? Zap a few frames? Fingerprinting tech laughs in the face of that sort of thing. The only two effective means of fooling fingerprinting tech are:
1. mangle the video so it can't possibly be recognized. Unfortunately, this means nobody can watch it without a special de-mangling player.
2. find out how the fingerprinting tech works, and make sure that only in those spots where it checks the original video, there's a difference. Of course any fingerprinting tech worth it's $$,$$$ will allow a seed value to change things around, and google rotates this once a week or however often needed once they realize people are getting around things in that way - and punish those users appropriately.
Not saying I agree with them doing it - though I find it hilarious in a sad way that if a copyright holder says "X is mine, please take it offline", that Google will do so - but not on Y which is the exact same video, or Z which is the exact same video getting uploaded a day later - but those are the ways they -can- do it.
I don't think anybody is suggesting that Google build an AI system that magically determines whether the copyright of a video lays with a third party and by means of technological ESP determines that said copyright holder did not consent to the upload - and I certainly don't think that Google is claming that they are either.
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"Darth Vader being a Jerk" video (Score:2)
The copyright holder tells YouTube that they believe that the copyright lays with them, and to please take it down. Google passes on this message to the person who uploaded the video. The person who uploaded the video then goes "uh, no - this is quite clearly a parody and is fully covered by blabla law" to YouTube. YouTube passes that on to the copyright holder, and they get to say that they either agree, or disagree.
If they disagree, YouTube would be in a unique positio
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Actually, that situation would be interesting!
You create a "C.S.I" parody video (not very difficult task, by the way) and it gets censored by the automatic filter at google. You sue and google goes to trial and looses. The judge orders google to disable or fix the automatic filter. As they cannot fix it (i
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By what rights? YouTube is a private site and has no obligation to post any submitted video, even if its perfectly legit.
absolute bull. (Score:3, Interesting)
ahh, the classic republican "but its private property" defense.
once a company reaches a certain size or market share they acquire powers rivalling government, and should be held to the same constitutional standards, otherwise there is no point to the constitution at all, because all the government has to do is privatize everything they can and then claim private property whenever people's civil liberties are violated.
this view does h
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So the Democratic National Committee (or was it MoveOn.org?) needs to post my video to their website, too. Post my comments to their website. Give me funds for my Independent party political campaign.
I'd say that the DNC (and RNC for that matter) are large and powerful enough to start falling under equal protections clauses of the Constitution.
This is the analogy: The illegality of racial discrimination and voyeurism vs. having a RIGHT to post a video clip to youtube? Wow. I mean if you are stereot
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yes, the DNC does fall under this, as does the RNC, and they are held responsible when they breach the law, e.g. watergate.
and.. more like "unconstitutionality of racial discrimination vs unconstitutionality of stifling freedom of expression". there is no "hundreds of orders of magnitude" difference save in your own mind, where apparently
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What you're probably referring to is the Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States [wikipedia.org] SCOTUS decision. This case, in turn, was about the constitutionality of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, though, and that act forbade - amon
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it's not about what has been ruled, it's about what must be done for our constitution to do what it was designed to do: protect us from the abuses of aristocracy.
at the time of the constitution's framing, kings were both rulers and controllers of the greatest assets. the constitution does not make a distinction between the
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It could work by indexing videos (or frame-windows) using statistics which are independent of format. For instance, some combination of color histograms, audio envelopes, pixel change per second, etc.
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One example of a kind of technology I could envision is streaming through the video, look for areas of the more or less same color inside a video stream, and code it with the approximate position on the screen (say, what 1/4 of the screen it start in in each direction, and which it end in) and which frames it stay in.
One such piece alone gives almost zero identification value. The sequence and duration of such pieces gives fairly hig
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Aha! There's the first point of failure for this tech then. Seems to me that much of the content on YouTube is already tag spammed. So even if it does contain a Captain Picard piece to camera from ST-TNG, it'll still be often tagged as "strip", "nude", "NSFW", "boobs", "booty" etc.
Come to think of it, there could be an upside to this filtering malarkey...
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Virage VideoLoggerTM
Index and Automa
Neat... (Score:1)
Oh the wonders of technology...
[J]
Pirated Content (Score:2)
Similarly, I don't torrent movies because I know that's infringement but I have NO problem downloading ANY over the air TV show that I want to watch (lost, 24, etc) even though I know that in the current framework that is considered to be infringing.
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Possible application for this technology (Score:3, Funny)
Don't care how they "figured it out" just... (Score:1)
Bad move (Score:3, Insightful)
The existence of the technology is interesting (Score:2)
In fact, experimenting with such technology is legally risky. Already according to TFA studios are accusing Google of "Dragging its feet" in deploying the technology, in other words knowingly letting pirated content to be posted for its own benefit. I still think they're probably within safe harbor, but they're skirting the edge.
Personally, I don't think Google needs to lift a finger in this direction. Safe harbor describes
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Yes, Apple
Video Cops (Score:1)
What about the other way around? (Score:1)
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The press has broad freedoms (that pesky first amendment) and are not generally bound by copyright law. As long as the context is a news story, they're under no obligation to copyright holders.
Think about it. Imagine a world
robot police and false positives (Score:2)
robots are incapable of human perception, flexibility, or personal discression.
every filtering system throughout history has produced false positives, especially egregious ones in the computer field.
this leads to inflexible censorship and "great firewall of china" style repression of free speech.
they did this with google video, and lost out to youtube, and when they do it to youtube theyll lose out to the next guy.
congrat
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Indeed. They don't accept bribes. There's also the small matter of the technology not being quite there yet, and being expensive.
YouTube: the new "broadcast" medium (Score:2)
Video, especially with modern desktop tools, is highly plastic. You learn to edit by cutting other's material and your own. Rappers and hip-hop
The gateway to the memory hole.... (Score:1)
Just what our cloak-and-dagger government needs.... more cloak.
Youtube soon to close (Score:2)
Why it took so long (Score:2)
"The long delay in brining the technology to market was due to the necessity of hiring thousands of new federal judges to rule on whether or not new uploads are fair use (parodies, short excerpts, etc) in real time. "
Wow! Google invents mindreading technology! (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm impressed that I'll be able to use that Disney clip loaded to Google Video that is embedded in my blog on a completely different site for my college research paper on Disney's history of copyright violations.
Chainletters (Score:1)
Viacom's lawyers will sue them anyway (Score:2)