Tuesday, February 20, 2007

New Weapon in Web War over Piracy

I was on youtube last week and searched for some clips from TV shows. But YouTube the video streaming site which I have been using often to see clips from different TV shows removed most of the files that are copyrighted. This article talks about a content-recognition software that detects songs and videos posted on webs without permission. This is an excerpt from the article on how Audible Magic’s software is used to identify video clips on the web

“The clip — drained of color, with dialogue dubbed in Chinese — appeared to have been recorded with a camcorder in a dark movie theater before it was uploaded to the Web, so the image quality was poor.
Still, Mr. Ikezoye’s filtering software quickly identified it as the sword-training scene that begins 49 minutes and 37 seconds into the Miramax film “Kill Bill: Vol. 2.”

The Audio fingerprinting technologies seem to be successful to detect copyrighted music on file-sharing networks. Smaller video sites such as Guba.com and Grouper.com are already using more basic filters that monitor videos and music files to stay out of the courtroom against the copyright holders. However, Guba.com president Eric Lambrecht said that their popularity went down. It seems as if he believes that video and music on file-sharing networks are not going to win the battle against copyright holders since he thinks his decision is a “long-term business decision”. Any thoughts?

Link : http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/19/technology/19video.html?pagewanted=2 by Brad Stone and Miguel Helft

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