TorrentSpy begins weeding out copyright content

TorrentSpy, the torrent-file search engine accused by Hollywood of aiding copyright violators, plans to remove links from its search results to pirated content using a new filtering system.

FileRights is an automated filtering system created by some of TorrentSpy's founders. The technology uses "hash" values to automatically remove links to infringing works from search engines that subscribe to the service.

In an interview, Rothken acknowledged that using hash marks to identify copyright content is not foolproof. If a file is altered then the system may not recognize it.

Filtering doesn't necessarily mean an end to the hostilities between Hollywood and the torrent search engines. In 2001, file-sharing system, Napster, launched a filtering system that failed to thwart illegal file sharing enough to satisfy the music industry or the courts.

FileRights works like most video filters. Copyright owners handover information about their films or TV shows and the system detects any files containing unauthorized copies. Links to those files are automatically removed.

Any copyright owner, Web site or search engine is welcome to subscribe to the service for free, according to the company's statement. According to Rothken, one of TorrentSpy's competitors, IsoHunt, has agreed to use the filtering system as well.

Zudeo launches as high-definition video sharing site

File-sharing company Azureus have launched a new video sharing website that it hopes will become the high-def equivalent of YouTube.

Using BitTorrent to make the downloading of large files much more manageable, the Zudeo (beta) web site looks set to promise 'better than DVD' quality films, up to high definition quality.

The Palo Alto, US, based service has already done deals with 12 TV, film and media companies, with full details being announced in a couple of weeks' time. As with most video sharing sites, any clips which infringe upon copyright and are flagged up by the owner will be removed.

There's no exact details as to exactly how high def these offerings are - full 1080p would seem to be pushing it at present.

The whole system is supposed to hold together because, as a user downloads a file on a BitTorrent network, they're also simultaneously uploading bits of that file to other users. However, that only decentralises bandwidth costs, not download times.

Videos will come in either H.264 or VC-1 format. DVD quality videos may also be available for live streaming for anyone with a fast enough connection: 300Kbps minimum according to the company.

SafeNet Launches Piracy-Monitoring Service

SafeNet Launches MediaSentry Business Intelligence Service for Audience Measurement and Piracy Monitoring on Global Peer-to-Peer Networks
World's First Service to Offer Content Owners and Digital Promotion Companies Direct Measurement Capabilities on Industry's Most Prolific File-Sharing Networks

Digital Hollywood Spring, Santa Monica, Calif.,– June 11, 2007 - SafeNet Inc., a global leader in information security, announced the launch of its MediaSentry Business Intelligence (BI) services portfolio which features world's first direct measurement of user activity across the most heavily trafficked peer-to-peer (P2P) networks globally.

The BI Direct Measurement service represents a significant opportunity for content owners and online advertisers to achieve an unprecedented level of visibility into P2P networks that have historically proven difficult to measure and understand.

By leveraging a combination of SafeNet's proven techniques for identifying and tracking content online and the unique analysis tools and reporting capabilities offered with BI Direct Measurement, customers will now be able to monitor, track, and understand user behavior and consumption on global P2P networks.

This insight into global consumer demand across one of the world's largest bases of content seekers can be used by content owners and online advertisers alike to understand emerging markets and measure consumer response to new distribution techniques, marketing initiatives and advertising campaigns.

"As the media industry identifies and begins to embrace a variety of new and innovative methods for turning next-generation consumers into captive audiences there is a desire to dedicate a larger portion of overall investment to online channels," said Analyst, Digital Media Practice, Frost & Sullivan, Zippy Aima. "Success reaching these new and evolving consumer segments requires a comprehensive and accurate understanding of what is truly happening on peer-to-peer networks. Until now, this type of data has been minimal at best."

Unlike other measurement services which employ a traditional sampling approach whereby data is captured in snapshots over specific time intervals, BI Direct Measurement continually captures all download activity for a chosen piece of digital content in real-time. Thus, visibility into how and when content is propagating globally across networks increases exponentially.

According to Vice-President, Global Outsourcing, SafeNet Infotech, Deepak Prasad, "Valuable download metrics including total quantity of files available, time of day, geography, version, download duration and success rates enable content owners to further assess consumer interest and content demand as well as quantify the impact of digital piracy."

"With more than 12 million users at any given time, peer-to-peer networks represent a tremendous business opportunity," said Vice President, MediaSentry Services, SafeNet, John Desmond. "Our goal is to provide the insight customers need to effectively protect their most valued digital assets while also finding ways to turn these growing communities into lucrative marketing, advertising, and distribution channels. BI Direct Measurement delivers this insight thus enabling our customers to develop forward-thinking distribution strategies which offer consumers attractive and compelling alternatives to pirated materials online."

About MediaSentry Business Intelligence Direct Measurement

The combination of SafeNet's global footprint and technical expertise in investigation services resulted in the development of the World's most powerful and accurate measurements available for assessing file-sharing activity. From this, content owners gain significant visibility into consumer demand and file-sharing patterns on one of the fastest growing distribution channels today – peer-to-peer networks. The portfolio of MediaSentry Business Intelligence solutions provides content owners with the essential tools and information they need to:

• Quantify the scope and financial impact of digital piracy
• Monitor leaks and first releases of premium content online
• Track piracy propagation throughout the content's lifecycle
• Understand user behavior and assess global trends on file-sharing networks
• Evaluate the effectiveness of specific anti-piracy campaigns and initiatives
• Perform drill down data analysis by country, title and network
• Make informed decisions around future distribution strategies

The state of our video ID tools (by Steve Chen, YouTube co-founder)

Recent speculation and stories like this Wall Street Journal article or this Reuters report on YouTube's use of video identification tools made us think it would be useful to clarify what we’re doing. We’ve been developing improved content identification for months, and we’re confident that in the not-too-distant future, we’ll unveil an innovative solution that will work for users and content creators alike. This is one of the most technologically complicated tasks that we have ever undertaken. But YouTube has always been committed to developing sustainable and scalable tools that work for all content owners.

Even though we haven’t given too many details, we’ve been hard at work. Earlier this year we implemented audio fingerprinting technology from Audible Magic, to help identify the audio content of music partners like Warner Music, Sony BMG, and Universal. Today we're experimenting with video identification tools, and will share with you a few core principles driving our technology development, past and present.

We are beginning tests on an automated system to identify and match specific videos. The technology extracts key visual aspects of uploaded videos and compares that information against reference material provided by copyright holders. Achieving the accuracy to drive automated policy decisions is difficult, and requires a highly tuned system. Once accuracy is achieved, the challenge becomes speed and scale to support the millions of people who use YouTube every day. We are working with some of the major media companies to test what we have developed. We’re excited about the progress so far, and we’re dedicated to making these tests successful, but as always with cutting-edge technologies, there’s no guarantee of success.

Now, when it comes to spotting pornography and graphic violence, and other content prohibited by our terms of use, nothing beats our community flagging. Once a user flags a video, we immediately review it and remove it if we find a violation. But our community can’t identify infringing content. We all know pornography and violence when we see them. But copyright status can only be determined by the copyright holder. That is because almost anyone who creates an original video has the copyright for that work, and such a wide range of copyright holders' preferences vary widely.

Some copyright holders want control over every use of their creation. Many professional artists and media companies post their latest videos without telling us, while some home video-makers don't want their stuff online. Some legal departments take down a video one day and the marketing department puts it up the next. Which is their right, but our community can’t predict those things, and neither can we. The same is true for technology. No matter how good our video identification technology gets, it will never be able to read copyright-holders’ minds.

If a content owner identifies material that she doesn’t want on YouTube, she can request its removal with the click of a mouse. If particular users repeatedly infringe copyrights, we terminate their accounts. We have long made a practice of creating a unique "hash" of every video removed for alleged copyright infringement and blocking re-uploads of the hash. We educate users on what is and isn’t permissible under the law. Our upcoming video identification system will be our latest way of empowering copyright holders, going above and beyond legal requirements.

We’ll continue our focus on delivering a great user experience. YouTube's no-fuss upload lets video artists collapse the gap between the creative moment and its worldwide publication. It helps our hundreds of media partners - as well as marketers and advertisers - spread their hottest work while it's still hot. And it enables presidential candidates participating in our YouChoose 2008 program to engage in a direct, open dialogue with voters, bringing transparency, access and authenticity to the political process. We’re carefully designing our new identification technologies to not impede those free and fast forms of expression.

In conclusion, a content management system has to have technology that provides high quality matching and detection, but it also has to apply business rules in ways that support the business objectives of partners while providing high quality user experiences. With the introduction of our video identification tools, YouTube will continue to be the leader in online video, and the premier destination for watching and sharing original videos worldwide. Now, back to work…

Veoh Raises $26M in Series C Funding

Veoh has raised another $26 million in Series C funding, granting the video sharing company more money raised than any other video-sharing site. The round was led by Goldman Sachs, and Pete Perrone has joined Veoh’s board. Also included in this latest round are existing shareholders Spark Capital and Shelter Capital Partners.

While Veoh doesn’t gain as much traffic as MetaCafe, YouTube or DailyMotion, it still remains the company that has gained the most in venture capital. Veoh is a good application and has had a long standing when it comes to the surge of video-sharing sites. In 2005, Veoh raised $2.75 million in a Series A round, and got an additional $12.5 million in its second round of funding last year.

Unlike its larger counterpart YouTube, Veoh has dealt with the problem of finding copyrighted content on the site, which no doubt fares well when Veoh seeks out large amounts of funding. With the ante raised, other video-sharing sites may be able to raise more funding for their own services as well.

Bebo Taps Audible Magic, Crafts Filtered Strategy

San Francisco-based social networking upstart Bebo has recently brokered a content protection deal involving Audible Magic. The deal taps Audible-powered content identification and digital fingerprinting solutions to remove unauthorized content from the destination.
"With Audible Magic we ensure that artists and the labels that represent them are the only ones who decide which songs they give away for free and which not," said Michael Birch, chief executive and founder at Bebo.

The move comes alongside steady growth in music-related properties at Bebo. According to recent estimates, Bebo houses approximately 500,000 artists, a quickly-growing tally.

Bebo, which currently counts roughly 33 million users, is most popular in the UK, Ireland and New Zealand, though it is also frequented in the US, Canada and Australia.

AT&T to police the Internet

Though details are vague, the LA Times reports that AT&T is joining forces with Hollywood and the recording industry in a concerted effort to begin more aggressive policing of its network in order to prevent users from sharing pirated content, such as films and music.

This is a sea-change for a major Internet provider, where there exists a tradition of remaining hands-off towards content passed over the network. James W. Cicconi, an AT&T senior vice president explained the change on policy, saying that as AT&T has begun selling pay-television services, the company’s interests have become more closely aligned with Hollywood.

Last week, about 20 technology executives from Viacom Inc., its Paramount movie studio and other Hollywood companies met at AT&T headquarters to start devising a technology that would stem piracy but not violate privacy laws or Internet freedoms espoused by the Federal Communications Commission.

Startups can fix the Internet’s copyright woes, but nobody wants to pay for it.

The battle between Viacom and YouTube was supposed to be Sean Varah’s big break.

The media conglomerate in March filed a $1-billion lawsuit against the video-sharing site, claiming YouTube was dragging its feet by failing to curb the spread of unauthorized copyrighted content across its network. That same day, Mr. Varah released video filtering software that he was certain would solve everyone’s problems.

But in the months since, Mr. Varah, founder and CEO of MotionDSP, has had no takers; he has come to realize that what was once viewed as a huge potential market—video filtering—has become the technology that nobody wants to pay for. MotionDSP, and other filtering companies like it, are now scrambling to come up with different business models. “I could build this copyright thing, but so far, I haven’t seen anyone who’s going to write me a large enough check for it,” he says.

Mr. Varah’s San Mateo, California-based company, which had initially developed motion enhancement software to improve cell phone video quality, churned out its new filtering tools in just a few months in response to what looked to be huge demand for the technology.

But MotionDSP and others have found that video-hosting sites have little incentive to pay for something that isn’t going to reap returns, and media companies are reluctant to fund the filtering themselves. Investors are shying away, too. “It’s just a little early to figure out how people are going to make money from these tools,” says Neil Sequeira of General Catalyst Partners.

That’s bad news for the dozen or more companies that were hoping to cash in with their tools that can identify copyrighted video content and remove it from a web site.

Video filtering technology works by creating digital codes that act like a video’s fingerprint. But matching one video fingerprint to another can be cumbersome because companies must amass enormous databases of original content for comparison against material illicitly uploaded on the sites.

Once unauthorized material is detected, it is usually removed from the web site. That, says Ty Roberts, CTO of Los Gatos, California-based Gracenote, explains the lack of incentive for implementing the technology. “It’s really hard to get people to pay a lot of money for something that doesn’t help them make more money,” he says.

That realization is forcing companies like Gracenote, which also identifies music tracks for record companies, to seek out other revenue models. Gracenote is turning its basic video identification software into a recommendation system for movie and TV fans.

Even market leader Audible Magic, also based in Los Gatos, is barely making money from video filtering. The eight-year-old company has snapped up the lion’s share of contracts, but it has acknowledged that each deal is worth no more than $1 million annually—an amount that rivals say shows the market remains far too small. Audible Magic hopes to turn its fingerprinting business into a service that calculates and delivers royalty payments that video sites owe media companies.

But not everyone views video filtering as a dead-end street.
Redwood City, California-based Attributor, which charges media companies for crawling the web to identify copyrighted material, in December snagged $10 million from Sigma Partners, Selby Venture Partners, and other VCs. “We think that there are between 5,000 and 8,000 content owners who will pay for this, plus the top 10 video hosting sites, and then the 1,500 behind them,” says Attributor investor Marco DeMiroz of Selby Venture Partners. “There are several billions of dollars of opportunity in this.” Mr. Varah, and others like him, surely wouldn’t mind filtering out some of that.

RedHerring

Google Hiring Shows Video Key to Growth

The $1.6 billion buyout of YouTube was a good indicator that Google, the Mountain View, Calif.-based search giant had serious designs on the online video business. Its recent moves, including a partnership with Apple, are signs that it will keep investing. More anecdotal proof that the $10 billion-a-year company is betting the farm on video, take a quick look at their job listings.

At present Google has about 2,800 open positions right now, and a large percentage is related to video. There are numerous postings for online video ads, video content analysis/search, and TV initiatives. The television-related positions show the company is beginning to look at convergence very seriously. Television-related positions are based in London.

Yahoo is no slouch either, and has been aggressively hiring video related personnel, according to UBS analyst Ben Schachter, who recently published a report analyzing the hiring trends at the two Internet giants.

Azureus Facing Lawsuit in France

Azureus, Shareaza and Morpheus are being sued by the music industry group Société des Producteurs de Phonogrammes en France (SPPF) under the new provisions of copyright law passed by the French Parliament last year, according to French blog Ratatium (English translation).

The software creators could face criminal penalties including up to three years in prison and a €300,000 fine if the case is successfully prosecuted in French courts.

Morpheus has declined in popularity since being successfully sued already, and Shareaza is entirely non-commercial. But Azureus is leveraging the popular BitTorrent client for its Vuze network which delivers authorized downloads of video and audio. Though that fact could potentially be used in its defense as proof that the software is not exclusively for illegitimate distribution.

The new copyright provisions, abbreviated to DADVSI, is similar to the DMCA in that the intention was to update laws in order to address issues surrounding digital technology, as well as bring France in line with the European Union Copyright Directive (EUCD) and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) treaty.

Amendments to the DADVSI, sponsored by then Minister of the Interior and now current President Nicolas Sarkozy and dubbed “The Vivendi Amendments,” added the criminal penalties of imprisonment and fines for makers of software that are meant to transmit copyrighted material illegally. Though the suit could become a forum for DADVSI detractors to challenge the constitutionality of these provisions.

So the SPPF can expect the full support of Sarkozy and his UMP party in their suit. As an indication of the change in the climate surrounding copyright in France, during a recent hunt for Sopranos video I discovered even the somewhat notorious Dailymotion appears to be getting more thorough in policing their site for unauthorized clips (and may soon be competing with YouTube for Francophonic users).

YouTube to test video ID system

Top online video service YouTube will soon test a new video identification technology with two of the world's largest media companies, Time Warner and Walt Disney.

The technology, developed by engineers at YouTube-owner Google, will help content owners such as movie and TV studios identify videos uploaded to the site without the copyright owner's permission, YouTube legal, marketing and strategy executives said in an interview on Monday.

The so-called video fingerprinting tools will be available for testing in about a month, a YouTube executive said.

Initially, YouTube said last year such tools would be made available to test by the end of 2006. But executives have said the reliable identification of content was a complex task that required it to develop its own technology tools.

Chris Maxcy, YouTube partner development director, said other media companies planned to test the technology, but he declined to name the other parties.

These tools will be made available to all content owners later this year.

Full article.

Does Digital Fingerprinting Work?: An Investigative Report

Audio and visual fingerprinting of copyrighted video is seen as the best way to combat infringement, but in NewTeeVee’s testing this week across multiple sites, it did not work. We were surprised to be able to upload multiple times the exact same copyrighted file, even after we explicitly told the hosting site and the fingerprinting provider about it and they took it down.

Microsoft recently took its Soapbox user-contributed video site out of the public eye until it could implement filtering technology from Audible Magic. Last Friday, it relaunched, supposedly armed and ready to fend off copyrighted content. So we asked our intrepid reporter Craig Rubens to test how the system worked by uploading a Daily Show clip.

Surprise, surprise, the clip went up like a charm. We called Microsoft to ask what was going on. You should talk to Audible Magic, they said; our system is only as good as their index. We called Audible Magic, who essentially blamed Microsoft, for only implementing the audio version of its software. The reps then set off to nail down statements from their companies, a process that took most of the week.

Only sometime last night did the clip finally get taken off Soapbox, replaced with a copyright violation notice. To see if the system had been corrected we uploaded it again today, and again it appeared about 40 minutes later. At this point, if all went as it was supposed to, the video should have been automatically added to the index of banned clips, and then rejected when we uploaded a duplicate. But again, we had no problem.

Concerns about whether digital fingerprinting is ready for action have persisted, and market leader YouTube has hesitated to deploy its “Claim Your Content” system while it is being perfected. However, confidence in fingerprinting has moved past the optimism stage. “This technology works,” says MPAA Vice-President Dean Garfield, as reported by BusinessWeek.
Audible Magic has bagged most every high profile deal in video filtering: MySpace, Dailymotion, Break.com, and GoFish/Bolt.

The Audible Magic representative insinuated the company’s technology was deployed in fuller form on MySpace — which recently launched its “Take Down Stay Down” and filtering system using AM’s system — so we also tried uploading the clip there. Interestingly, that also posed no problem.

Here are the official statements Microsoft and Audible Magic sent yesterday after days of deliberation and phone calls about the issue.

“We are continuing to work with Audible Magic to fine tune our implementation of their proactive automatic filtering services to best meet the needs of our content partners. The fact that a clip of any unauthorized copyright material slipped through is unfortunate, but that’s why we also provide rich notice and takedown tools to content owners to automate and expedite the process of identifying and removing unauthorized content. We are committed to working in partnership with the industry to continue to evolve our technologies and solutions for customers and partners.” — Rob Bennett, general manager for Entertainment and Video Services at MSN

“Audible Magic’s technology has the ability to identify content such as ‘The Daily Show’ clip in question. We are working closely with Microsoft to customize our solution in order to meet the business needs of their Soapbox service.” — Vance Ikezoye, founder and CEO of Audible Magic

Though all these systems, as advertised, depend largely on identifying content once in order to block it future times, we made no bones about identifying our uploads as Daily Show clips. We also had no problem uploading the exact same file after we had informed the proper people about it and they had taken it down.


full article here

Pirate-Proofing Hollywood

Video fingerprinting could remove a lot of the guesswork for moviemakers.

Right now, tinseltown is all agog over Johnny Depp's latest, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End. But a different piracy saga may have a more lasting impact on the industry. By the end of May, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) will report to its member studios the results of tests of a dozen computerized video-fingerprinting systems. This technology is designed to identify pirated movies wherever they exist on the Internet, automating a job that is now done by staffers who look for infringing clips with their own eyes.

Fingerprinting systems could be a crucial link in the battle to control video content on the Net. Most studios and TV networks have come to terms with the idea that they need to make shows available on the Net. However, tensions over whether they get paid for clips recently led Viacom to slap Google Inc.'s video site YouTube with a $1 billion copyright-infringement lawsuit. The MPAA is expected to report that the technology, after years of testing, is now ready for prime time. Says MPAA Vice-President Dean Garfield: "This technology works."

But that doesn't guarantee video Web sites will agree to deploy it. Many of the Web giants, including MySpace.com (owned by media giant News Corp. ), Microsoft, and Yahoo!, have said they plan to do so. But others--particularly YouTube--are moving more slowly, say sources in the industry. One reason is it's still not clear who will pay for video search. The systems must be deployed both by the studios, which create a database of film "fingerprints" or markers, and by the video sites, which run user-uploaded videos through software to find matches.

TIPS FOR CLIPS

The hunt for viable video-fingerprinting technology is akin to an episode of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. In recent years, many video sites have done deals with Audible Magic Corp. in hopes of using its music-search technology to spot pirated films and TV shows by analyzing sound tracks. But what if they've been dubbed into Chinese or Italian? Also, hackers have plenty of ways to disguise pirated video. To throw off studio screeners, they may change the name of a clip or start with a few seconds of a home movie. Many older fingerprinting technologies can be duped by tilting the image slightly so that the bits are harder to recognize.

But screening companies are making progress. Two-year-old Vobile Inc. in Santa Clara, Calif., did well in the MPAA tests, with technology that extracts what it calls "video DNA" from a movie. Executives won't say what that DNA is but say it lets them spot even a few seconds of a fingerprinted film. In a demonstration, CEO Yangbin Wang shows how the software identified a fuzzy scene of Walt Disney Co.'s The Jungle Book shot at an angle with a camcorder.

Instead of just using the fingerprinting technology to prevent access to pirated material, the film studios say they want to strike deals that would squeeze dollars out of clips. They suggest someone who tries to download a pirated episode of a hot show like Lost could be asked to pay $2.99. Or a site might let viewers watch the car-chase scene in Bullitt free of charge, so long as they put up with a Chrysler ad. Ad revenues would be shared by the site and the copyright- holding studio.

Google has said it is working on its own video-fingerprinting technology but hasn't announced a timetable for deployment. In the meantime, YouTube has limited technology to keep offending clips from popping back up once they've been identified. And its 10-minute limit on clips prevents the loading of whole shows. "We're always working on whatever we can think of to help copyright holders protect their rights," says Glenn Brown, a Google lawyer.

But studio executives and suppliers of fingerprinting systems complain that the search giant is singularly resistant to negotiations. Google has a partnership with Audible Magic, but industry insiders say that company's technology for fingerprinting music is not yet up to the task of identifying video.

Or, as some industry officials suggest, the hurdle may not be technological at all. Google may not have decided yet how much of the online box office it wants to share with Hollywood.

Audible Magic’s copyright filtering technology not working

Audible Magic, the Los Gatos company that protects music and other content publishers from piracy by scanning files posted around the Web, is having problems.

NewTeeVee tested the so-called finger-printing technology across multiple sites, including Microsoft’s video site, and even enlisted that company’s help when it didn’t work. But time and again, despite posting a copyrighted file to Microsoft’s site, it wasn’t flagged, and the file was posted for free viewing.

This is notable because Audible Magic’s technology has been adopted by a wide range of players, including YouTube (at least, YouTube has announced it will use the technology; it isn’t clear whether it has started), Daily Motion, EyeSpot and Grouper. Having such technology in place is also used by video sites as a defense against copyright violation suits, which is relevant because Google was sued recently by Viacom for such violation.

Audible has several competitors, including Advestigo, Attributor, Auditude, Gracenote and Vobile.

Audible Magic, of Los Gatos raised $3 million in funding six years ago from Florida Silicon Partners and individuals, including Jeffrey Pfeffer, a Stanford professor. At the time, that was its third round of funding. Another investor is Tierra Del Oro, also of Florida, run by Addison Fischer, chairman of SmartDisk (Audible is listed as a portfolio company). The company declined comment when we tried to confirm details of the company’s financing two months ago.

French sports groups join suit against YouTube

France's top soccer league and its national tennis organization are the latest to join legal action against video-sharing site YouTube.

The Federation Francaise de Tennis and Ligue de Football Professionnel, as well as New York-based Cherry Lane Music Publishing, have joined a class action lawsuit that accuses YouTube and parent company Google of copyright violations, according to Louis Solomon, one of the attorneys representing the plaintiffs in the suit.

The suit was initially filed last month on behalf of the lead plaintiffs in the case: Bourne, a music publishing company and the Premier League, England's most prestigious soccer league.

Another executive shakeup at Revver

Video-sharing site Revver said Thursday that CEO Steven Starr has stepped down, in the company's second executive shakeup in the past six months.

One of the sector's pioneers in sharing revenue with videographers, Revver said in a statement that Kevin Wells, the company's chief operating officer takes over for Starr, who will now serve as Revver's chairman.

Revver competes in a crowded video-sharing market by billing itself as a friend to artists. But what many performers prize most is an audience. Revver's has never come close to the size of YouTube's, the sector's frontrunner.

In the last few months, privately held Revver has seen the departure of much of its staff. Under Starr, the Los Angeles-based company also launched an effort to sign content-licensing deals with Hollywood studios but abruptly abandoned the plan after only a few months, according to former employees.

In December, Revver saw cofounders Ian Clarke and Oliver Luckett leave, as well as David Tenzer, a veteran Hollywood agent hired to help find licensing deals.

Attributor Chosen to Protect AP Content

Attributor Corporation, the media company that offers transparency and accountability for online publishers, announced it will be providing monitoring and analysis for Associated Press content on the web.

It’s fingerprinting technology will be used for Associated Press copy, and will identify and document its display wherever it appears on the Internet. This is in effort to protect AP content and safeguard property rights, enabling new licensing and distribution models. With the added protection, the AP will grow its distribution efforts for spreading content across the web. The Attributor platform will continuously monitor the Internet and perform comparison and analysis against AP content to create a customized view of content usage, which includes a way to better track the compliance of applicable licensing and legal agreements.

This deal will initially cover AP text, and will later include other media formats for testing. Attributor will also be used with the organizations that exchange or distribute editorial content or information through the AP, and the two companies plan to explore potential editorial, licensing and advertising applications based on the Attributor platform as well. This is a petty big deal for a startup that offered up its services for digital fingerprinting across all media types late last year. Audible Magic is another company with fingerprinting technology, which is being used by Daily Motion, Eyespot, Grouper, MySpace, YouTube and Viacom.

GooTube strikes deal with EMI, after label shuns DRM with Apple

EMI Music, the world’s third largest music label company, said it has reached a deal with Google and its YouTube property to allow YouTube users to exploit EMI music while creating videos.

The move follows Apple’s move yesterday to start selling EMI songs without copy protection (digital rights management, or DRM) through its iTunes store.

Warner to put ad-supported video archive online

Warner Music, the world's fourth-largest music group, is putting its archive of music video online and making it available for free to fans.

Revenue will be driven by advertising but music fans will be able to download the videos for an additional fee and Warner will also examine syndicating the content to a third party. The deal includes plans to develop subscription-based services and a version to be used on mobile platforms.