MySpace Begins Rollout of Video Monitoring Tech 90
C|Net is carrying an article looking into new technology MySpace is rolling out to combat user violation of copyright laws on their pages. Called 'Take Down, Stay Down', the service will attempt to ensure that once content is removed because of a complaint it can never be uploaded again. "Copyright owners have access to Take Down Stay Down free of charge, according to a release from MySpace. If the social-networking service receives a takedown notice regarding a copyrighted clip hosted through its MySpace Videos hosting service, MySpace's new feature will take a 'digital fingerprint' of the video and add it to a copyright filter that blocks the content from being uploaded again. '(It's) the ability to have a piece of content imprinted and put in a database so we can identify it,' said Vance Ikezoye, CEO of Audible Magic." The article goes on to discuss the problems YouTube is facing with the same issues, as well as recent investigations of this issue in the political arena.
Bogus take-downs. (Score:3, Insightful)
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The search for the Holy Grail (Score:1, Interesting)
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Re:The search for the Holy Grail (Score:4, Interesting)
Why bother? Just use another website.
Every website has a finite time in the sun, and RupertSpace is no exception. There will even be a day (soon?) when people say "Now what was that website called, TheirSpace or something?"
Who remembers AltaVista? It was as big as Google and RupertSpace in its day. Everyone thought it was the ultimate answer and unassailable when it "indexed the whole Internet". As altavista faded so will RupertSpace (and even Google eventually) and their restrictions on users will be irrelevant.
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Makes no sense. The News Corp purchase should really have been the instant death of MySpace cool.
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Makes no sense. The News Corp purchase should really have been the instant death of MySpace cool.
It makes plenty of sense when you take into account the fact the people who most need to care about myspace's MAFIAA connections are the least likely to know about them.
Young musicians have been signing recording contracts without doing their due diligence for decades, posting to myspace is 10000x more common and easy than that. If they can't do it for the big recording contract, they sure won't do it to use a "free" website.
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A lot of us are still waiting? (Score:3, Insightful)
You are certainly correct, but
I'd guess that almost everyone on Slashdot is waiting for their personal vendetta objects to fade, be they Microsoft, Apple, the open source movement, Google, MySpace, the music industry cartel, the movie industry cartel, and a list of thousands more, including for some people (probably not mainstream Slashdotters) large organized nations and religions....
Much as I would like to fantasize to the contrary, even if you believe in future sh
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All you would need to do to defeat their 'digital fingerprinting technology' would be to change a single bit in a file to something else then the odds of getting the same hash would be astronomical.
So yeah, I'm thinking its something along the lines of a publicity stunt by Myspace to look like they are actually doing something. Also they are required
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They do have to honor put-back requests, but there's a 10-14 day delay required by the law in question [wikipedia.org] before taken down material can be put back. This gives people who want to have time-sensitive material removed from the site (e.g., content that could affect an election, or a protest, or somesuch, a couple days from now) a very big advantage.
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Not making it impossible, just impractical (Score:2)
It might come down to another technology arms race. Or it might come down to an uneasy truce, if the lawyers can keep their paws off of things....
hacking call to arms (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:hacking call to arms (Score:5, Informative)
Most video fingerprinting technology can deal with mirroring, rotating, shearing, compression, time stretching, channel swapping (RGB and YUV), and practically any other method you can think of. One thing you -can- is chop it up into fragments that are smaller than the watermarking window, and distribute those fragments across the canvas randomly. The problem with that (and, actually, almost all of the aforementioned methods) is that the video is unwatchable and compresses horribly. The latter you're stuck with, the former you could code a special plugin for that unscrambles the video. But at that point, it's no longer video for the masses.
I'm sure other posters have already pointed out that people will just upload/download on a different service, etc. so I won't go into that here.. nor the possible (unlikely, but possible) 'fair use' issues.
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There's your "unlikely, but possible" fair use issues.
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At that point, video services could investigate for themselves,
What makes you think they start now? Heck, it took a user rebellion for Digg to grow a pair and refuse to take down a fraking number.
Right. And we can trust the copyright holder to diligently consider the fair use value of things like a parody campaign against the Colbert Report [eff.org]. They're just going to fingerprint everything and have a robot send out notices, just like they've always done.
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Translation: In Rupert'sSpace there is no Fair Use.
I think these media companies are crazy (Score:2)
If everybody is showing a 5 minute clip from some TV show that Big Media Conglomerate (BMC) owns the copyright on, and assuming this is foolproof, does BMC think "Oh gee, when those dirty filthy kids can't 'steal' my content, they'll be sure to pay me to use it?".
This is a classic case of:
1) Stop everybody from listening/watching my content
2) ?????
3) Profit!
I was flipping through the XBox 360 the other day, and I realized they're
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1. No advertising!
2. Permanency. Less of an advantage.
It's not as easy to record programs permanently as it used to be. DVD recorders for TVs are scarce, VCRs and their tapes are rare, and standard DVRs tend to delete things after a certain amount of time--or, for the one I used to use, an uncertain amount of time. This, of course, is the MPAA's fault.
South Park has reached syndication. It's on over-the-air stations now--truly fr
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Also, the TV shows you download on Xbox Live are ad-free and whatnot. It's pretty much the iTunes Store, but by Microsoft instead of Apple.
Not so simple.... (Score:3, Insightful)
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The military would pay some amount of money for it, and it would take 2 years to cut a deal with them. Google and MySpace on the other hand will lose untold wealth in just a few months - if they don't come up with a way to get the lawyers off their backs.
These smart guys have the right technology at the right time. They're cashing out big time.
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image classification
image retrieval
texture classification
texture retrieval
Hmmm.... (Score:3, Insightful)
It reminds me of the claims made by various "smart" porn blockers that "know" naked flesh from regular skin tones and photos -- generally it's nothing but baseless hype, or it's going to find a lot of false positives.
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To create the fingerprint:
1. Transform the frames to contrast edges. I forget what the filter is called but it'll basicly give you an outline of all the edges, with very little info
2. Split the frame into squares, calculate a brightness value from the edge frame
3. Throw all of this into a database
To check the fingerprint:
1. Decode a few keyframes
2. Calculate same info for those frames
3. Use a quick sort on brightness to find
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Also, wouldn't the video editors change the frame rate and do some other transformations in the video? What about various encoding schemes?
Basically, could you transform it enough to repost it and defeat the matching algorithms?
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My cell provider offers this service where I call a number, leave it connected for 30 seconds, and it will reply with an SMS with the artist and name of the song which is currently playing. It works extremely well, even in crowded bars with lots of noises, and it requires only a 30 second clip. It's quite impressive.
But then again, nobody actively tries to fool this thing to gain so
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I hope MySpace's system doesn't do the video equivalent. I hope it doesn't treat parodies of commercial copyrighted work the same way as actual commercial copyrighted work, and take all the parodies down with the less-than-legitimate videos...
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Well, only fingerprinting the audio track would still suffice to get rid of pirated south park episodes.
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here's a question (Score:1)
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I don't think so. Although MySpace and YouTube are both announcing that they are going to use similar copyright-protection systems, they are not part of the same system, so if a video is taken down on MySpace, it won't necessarily be taken down on YouTube.
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Cranky because your job got outsourced? (Score:2)
Thats just about everyone (Score:3, Insightful)
Will there be some kind of registration for commercial copyright owners? This is how it looks to me:
I guess the new ISP monitoring tools in place from an earlier article will be able to trackdown rogue posters.
I've really had enough of this crap. Commercial copyright owners will never learn that any exposure, that is non-commercial, or motivated by profit is good for your content. Serve it up and people will pay (;|;)
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It has been pretended by some, (and in England especially,) that inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions, and not merely for their own lives, but inheritable to their heirs. But while it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all, it would be singular to admit a natural and even an hereditary right to inventors. It is agreed by those who have seriously considered th
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Lemme get this straight... (Score:3, Insightful)
Hypothesis: AM's claim is bullshit.
Test: Everyone try uploading the same video, but add static and drop random frames from the start/end.
Outcomes: If hypothesis is true, AM and the Copyright Mafia look incredibly stupid. Again. If hypothesis is false, they handed us a free DDoS to push MySpace off the 'Net with by consuming all their processor time with hash checking.
Conclusion: Regardless of outcome, hackers win. Once again, DRM and everyone associated with it are Lolcows, unable to stop others from milking their stupidity for our amusement.
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http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/28/2 0 2206:/ [slashdot.org]
http://www.ilrweb.com/viewILRPDF.asp?filename=umg_ lindor_070223JacobsonDepositionTranscript:/ [ilrweb.com]
Nothing like relying on trade secrets and black box algorithms to make you sure that you're taking down the right files and leaving up the clean ones.
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AudibleMagic claims to have invented an algorithm that can recognize the same video in different forms better than the human brain can, across any format? That must mean the video is decoded into it's component frames before hashing, since that's how our brains get it. And better yet, this "Hash-Every-Frame" routine (which is apparently better than any other by leaps and bounds) will run on a site the size of MySpace without a BlueGene/L driving it? Uh-Huh. Say, NewsCorp, I've got this old bridge...
I reckon it wouldn't be too difficult to implement, actually. First, there's no need to examine every frame; one in every 50 would probably be enough. Then, the procedure is probably as follows:
confused but IANAL. (Score:2)
So if someone puts some of my content up without my consent can I sue them? What if it was uploaded by an anonymous person using Tor as a browser registered using fake information for the purpose of suing?...
This seems like a bad idea.
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IANAL either, but from my understanding you are still protected under safe harbor if you proactively remove copyrighted content or questionable content. As in... Youtube is still protected by safe harbor if they remove a video which was too obscene or violated its ToS without going through DMCA hoops. You don't have to have a common carrier status to be protected f
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"(B) does not receive a financial benefit directly attributable to the infringing activity, in a case in which the service provider has the right and ability to control such activity"
Advertising i
Underlying technology... (Score:1, Informative)
Also, they have to apply this filter only when content is added to a page, not every time it is played, so its a little less computationally intensive than some people have suggested.
It may be more expensive to search all existing fingerprints every time a new take-down request comes in.
Copyright owners have access (Score:2)
Strike me down.. (Score:2)
Its time to get their heads out of the sand, the entire concept of 'content rights' is out the window.
Learn from the past (Score:5, Insightful)
Almost 10 years ago now there was a little app some of you may remember called Napster. It offered mp3 downloads that, at the time, could take half an hour or more to complete. But it was worth it, because you couldn't get the music anywhere else (for free, anyway). Napster got closed down, but everyone just moved their collections over to Kazaa, Limewire, BearShare, etc etc. A few years later, the music industry catches up and realises that users are resilient and know what they want. This the iTunes Music Store (and its rivals) were born.
Now we're in a faster internet age, the same is happening with video. People want on-demand content. If someone tells me about a funny Colbert clip, I'm not going to check the TV guide for a repeat showing. I'll stick it into YouTube and watch it there. YouTube delete the Colbert clips? I'll watch it on DailyMation. Repeat ad infinitum.
Myspace can block out videos but people will find a way, and continue to find a way until the networks realise that in 2007, for the first time, the audience is starting to control the media.
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Yeah, except for the 3 times the next day (or sometimes the next week) that they replay it. They also throw up repeats when they take a week vacation, but that's not good if you're looking for something specific. I'm just wrangling...
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Double edged sword (Score:2)
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Audible Magic (Score:2)
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/28/2 0 2206 [slashdot.org]
http://www.ilrweb.com/viewILRPDF.asp?filename=umg_ lindor_070223JacobsonDepositionTranscript [ilrweb.com]
Nothing like relying on trade secrets and black box algorithms to make you sure that you're taking down the right files and leaving up the clean ones.
Myspace's priorities (Score:4, Insightful)
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It will become unusable (Score:2)
But if it's true then there will be so much content marked for takedown that the site itself will be completely unusable. If nothing else people will mark every video as in violation just out of spite.
Oy. (Score:1)