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Tuesday, August 22, 2006 Capturing Online Video PiratesCan video fingerprinting and watermarking technology stop copyright violators? By Wade Roush
YouTube visitors upload 65,000 videos every day and download 100 million of them. Since all those videos have to come from somewhere, it's no surprise that many are pirated -- that is, copied from commercial TV broadcasts and movies and posted without the permission of the copyright holders. YouTube and similar video-sharing services deal with these copyright violations after they occur: by taking down the material if they receive a complaint from the legitimate copyright holder. But given the sheer number of videos uploaded to the Internet every day, it's a losing battle. What's needed, say researchers in digital rights management, are ways to automatically screen out pirated videos before they're uploaded, and to track down people who make pirate copies. And, as it turns out, such technology is nearing the point of widespread adoption. One video-sharing site, Guba, has already begun to filter out copyrighted videos using a home-grown system dubbed "Johnny." The system reduces a video file to a mathematical representation and then excludes it from the site if its "fingerprint" matches one in a database of commercial videos. Media-technology companies such as Philips and Thomson are also working on ways to thwart video pirates. Thomson has introduced a system that embeds invisible "watermarks" in movies, allowing studios to trace online copies of movies recorded by camcorder users to the specific theater and movie showing where they were pirated. These new technologies have their own limitations, though. For one, it's not clear that fingerprinting technology can keep up with the thousands of hours of TV programming broadcast every day. And watermarking a movie doesn't help catch the pirates themselves. But these new copyright-protection mechanisms may at least help video-sharing sites avoid the fate of the infamous music-trading sites Napster and MP3.com, which closed down after legal attacks by content owners. Pirated video makes up about one-fifth of the moving-image content uploaded to video-sharing sites, according to Tom McInerney, founder and CEO of San Francisco-based Guba. And while the sharing sites benefit indirectly from pirated videos, which generate Web traffic and advertising impressions, hosting this material is often more trouble than it's worth. In a well-publicized case in February, for example, NBC threatened legal action against YouTube if the site refused to remove a video of a popular "Saturday Night Live" skit (a skit that would not have become popular, ironically, if it hadn't been posted on YouTube). YouTube complied, but caught flak from hundreds of its users for supposedly buckling under to a giant "old-media" company. And in July, the helicopter pilot who filmed the beating of trucker Reginald Denny during the 1992 riots in Los Angeles sued YouTube for hosting a pirated copy of his video. He's demanding $150,000 in damages for every viewing of the video.
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10/20/2008
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Comments
slotus on 08/22/2006 at 2:28 PM
1
Companies need to learn that they can make more money by embracing technology, then by jealously trying to guard their shows and movies. Piracy hurts the industry, but it also does some good - in letting unlikely viewers to sample content not available to them, or just not of interest to them. This in turn allows new viewers and consumers to gain interest in a product that they initially had no interest in. They should begin posting tv shows online, and possibly movies, for free (maybe once the dvd sales have gone down, they can post it online) and put ads in between - people will continue watching regardless of the amount of ads. It'll keep viewers happy, and it'll still make them a net-profit.
Most of all it lets companies keep control of their content and offset piracy while still returning a profit on their work. As opposed to viewers just going to underground torrent and p2p sites to download it illegally, which translates into a loss.
Monsterboy on 08/22/2006 at 2:44 PM
62
Seriously, though, I can see the need for this in terms of the not getting sued; the Reginald Dennings videographer, for example, is pretty clearly out for a buck, and it would be best for YouTube to cut him off at the pass.
In fact, it occurs to me that this is exactly what's needed to get the big media companies to understand the situation. Let them keep their clips off the net. Let the people who don't do so benefit from the free fan publicity.
gabrielg01 on 08/25/2006 at 10:12 AM
314
What if one introduces slight changes into the video (imperceptible to the eye)? This altered video would have a different signature than the original, and therefore it would evade detection by the automated system.
jpdemers on 08/29/2006 at 3:56 AM
34
They aren't about to disclose what goes into a fingerprint, but I'm guessing it involves large-scale properties like, say, the overall brightness or color of the screen. Plot that as a function of time and you have a nice, unique, wiggly line, mathematically reducible (can you spell "Fourier"?) to a signature that can be matched to similar (if not identical) patterns generated by altered copies. A pirate could probably evade detection, but he might have to move or delete entire scenes to do so -- and decent software would look for such transformations.
A watermark might be easier to defeat, but it's a crapshoot: you wouldn't know where in the film to make your changes.
Pirated content *will* be detectable. The smart studios and content providers will decide if the bootleg is doing more harm than good, and sic their lawyers only on the bad guys (the ones who delete the commercials, for instance).
Smart distributors like YouTube will make an effort to do more good than harm. Free ads for Universal Pictures, for example, or a link to a.theatre.near.you.com, might soothe ruffled feathers at the studio and leave everyone happy. (Well, everyone but the lawyers.)
Piracyhater on 01/19/2007 at 2:08 PM
2