Battling Piracy, BayTSP-Style

“On an average day, there are 16 million violations that we’re finding,” said BayTSP spokesman Jim Graham. Of that, one million violations a month receive takedown notices. “Not all clients want to send takedown notices,” said Graham. “A lot just want to see the data on what’s available out there.”

Here’s how BayTSP works. A client gives it a list of titles (movies, TV shows, etc.) to monitor. BayTSP’s automated hardware then sniffs around major P2P sites, IRC, Usenet groups, public FTP sites and web sites and reports back its findings.

For P2P sites, if a title is found and the client wants to have it removed, BayTSP automatically generates a takedown notice that records the individual’s IP address, date and time identified, and sends it off to the ISP. The ISP then forwards the notice to the individual. Some ISPs and universities are adopting the open source Automated Copyright Notice System to automate the process of notifying infringers.

But what does all this cost? Between $25,000 and $500,000 a month, depending on how many titles you are searching and what services you want performed.

Full story here

The Wall Street Journal did a profile a couple months back:
- BayTSP employs more than 20 video analysts
- Analyst salaries start at around $11 an hour
- Viacom pays more than $100,000 a month to BayTSP
- BayTSP error rate on Web videos is only around 0.1%