ACID Scans Web for Pirated Multimedia

The Virage division of Autonomy has developed search technology that can scan the Web for pirated video and multimedia clips.

ACID (Automatic Copyright Infringement Detection) can detect illegally posted rich media in any format wherever it is posted, according to Autonomy founder and CEO Michael Lynch.

"Acid watches very large amounts of video and it can spot video that is owned by someone else," in a highly automated process, Lynch said. It could be used to detect movies, television clips or any copyrighted media posted, for example, on YouTube, on personal Web sites or on any other Web site, according to company officials.

The technology is equally useful to these file-sharing sites, because it gives them the means to scan their sites for infringing media before it's posted, or at least before it results in a lawsuit. The technology allows these scans to be performed quickly to avoid lengthy delays in posting new content online.

ACID uses Autonomy's "meaning-based computing" technology, which allows computers to find relationships within many different types of unstructured data, including text, word processing documents, e-mails, audio and multimedia.

Acid uses patented image and audio analysis technology to look for known examples of copyrighted material no matter what format it's stored in. ACID is also based on Autonomy's IDOL (Intelligent Data Operating Layer), a basic search platform that can analyze information in more than 1,000 formats including text, voice and video.

Since ACID works with all media formats, it can detect whether a portion of a copyrighted video or audio tract has been overlaid or stored as part of a new and original media file.