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Clearly, life would be easier for the owners of video-sharing sites if copyrighted content could be blocked before it's posted. And that's what Guba claims Johnny can do. The company was founded in 1998 to build a tool that could search for still images and videos posted to Usenet discussion groups. But as soon as the company began to aggregate such content, it started receiving complaints and takedown requests from copyright holders. "We wanted to make it easier to find things, but we ended up demonstrating how much copyrighted content is really out there," says McInerney.
That inspired them to switch gears and start developing Johnny (named after the Keanu Reeves character in "Johnny Mnemonic"). "We needed a system that could identify and classify [copyrighted] video without human assistance," McInerney says.
The centerpiece of the system is a huge database of digital fingerprints for copyrighted video. Each fingerprint is created using wavelet compression technology that distills the video signal into a few compact mathematical representations. It does the same for the audio track, and it uses computer vision technology to measure the frequency of scene changes, providing a kind of time signature. The compressed video and audio signals and time signature together make up the file's fingerprint.
Johnny extracts a fingerprint from every video uploaded to Guba, and if it matches a fingerprint already in the database, the file gets quarantined and flagged for review by a human. The system is so effective, McInerney says, that only one percent of the flagged video files turn out not to be copyrighted.
Guba may eventually license Johnny to other video-sharing sites; but for now the technology -- and the company's commitment to copyright protection -- are giving it an advantage in negotiating with networks and movie studios for the rights to sell downloads. Already, Guba is hosting downloads of full-length films from Warner and Sony.
Nevertheless, digital rights management experts aren't convinced that fingerprinting technology will be a silver bullet against video piracy, even though it has been used successfully by the music business. One problem is simply the burgeoning amount of copyrighted content needing fingerprinting. "The universe of music tracks to be fingerprinted is relatively tractable, compared to copyrighted video clips such as every day's newscasts on television networks and stations throughout the world," writes Bill Rosenblatt, editor of Jupitermedia's DRM Watch. "Updating such a large and fast-growing fingerprint database, and making it efficient enough to be used in the filtering of copyrighted material from a site like Guba, seems utterly impractical."
But to survive, says Guba's McInerney, video download services "are going to need to make efforts to scrub the copyrighted stuff off their sites -- and we think the best solution is a technological solution."
A new product from Swarmcast monitors data flow to optimize video quality.
what if you slightly alter the video?
Ok, so they have this fingerprinting technology - but this works on the assumption that people upload unaltered videos, thus representative fingerprints can be matched.
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.
Guest (jpdemers)
Re: what if you slightly alter the video?
Gee, do you suppose they've thought of that?
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.)
Peekvid.com is using YouTube.com and Dailymotion.com to display movies so people can watch them online for free. It's going to wreck the movie industry. I'm fed up with my friends saying that they don't want to go to the movie theater to watch movies because they already SAW them, without paying! This is worse than people giving their friends burned cds. Isn't anything being done to stop this???
Manufacturing in the United States is in trouble. That's bad news not just for the country's economy but for the future of innovation.
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slotus
1 Comment
Come on..
Well this is just plain dumb, because most of those video sites including YouTube only get traffic because of the uploaders putting shows, music and other 'copyrighted' content on them. You Tube would be nothing if not for the illegal copyrighted content, also movies like Snakes on a Plane would have the least bit of chance if not for the wanton of copyright infringing content uploaded on the web including spoof trailers.
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.
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Monsterboy
92 Comments
Re: Come on..
What? Do you not realize how many people are addicted to that unique video quality that comes of compressing a 1/2 hour sitcom episode into a 10MB upload? Why buy a DVD ever again when I can watch a 3-inch square mono version for free (for the three days it's up before it gets pulled and you have a dead link)?
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.
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