French startup Advestigo aims to save Youtube and others from legal peril

Eurovalley blog post
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Back in November, Universal brought a copyright infringement suit against MySpace, claiming that it contributed to the copyright infringement committed by the service’s users. When Google bought YouTube, rumours were circulating of a 500 million USD escrow account to be used only for the purposes of paying rightholders so that Google/YouTube would not be sued for copyright infringement.
The reason for the lawsuits and defensive measures is clear. Service providers are afraid that they will be held liable for their users illegally submitting copyright protected works for sharing purposes.
French startup Advestigo aims to calm those fears. It has developed a digital fingerprinting technology called “AdvestiGATE” that helps companies providing online media content sharing services to easily identify copyright protected music and video, and block users from submitting such content to the service. The service works by calculating a digital fingerprint of each uploaded file, and comparing it to an existing database of copyright protected works to see if the work belongs to a well-known artist, movie studio etc. In other words, if it belongs to someone with the money to sue the service provider.
The product seems to have potential demand, as the discussion above shows that big service providers are clearly worried about legal liability.
Service providers should keep in mind that in Europe they can potentially rely on the protection of the safe harbours offered by Article 14 of the E-Commerce Directive, which, to simplify slightly, exempts service providers hosting third party content from liability, provided that they do not have notice of the illegal activity, or are not aware of the circumstances from which the illegal activity is apparent. Most content sharing service providers should thus be safe, provided that as soon as they are notified of illegal content, they take it down. Bigger players might have a cause of concern though. If it is well known that the service is used for sharing copyright protected files, one might argue that the provider should know of the fact, and thus can not rely on the safe harbour.
This is where technologies such as AdvestiGATE supposedly come in (though others exist as well). They aim to offer the service provider a peace of mind by enabling them to take steps to ensure that the service is no longer used for the unauthorised sharing of files, and therefore make it possible for them to again argue that they should be entitled to the protection offered by Article 14 as they have no notice of any isolated cases of infringement that might occur despite the filtering technology that is put in place.
Interesting to see what the takeup of the technology will be. Who says money can’t buy peace?

January 22nd, 2007
http://eurovalley.net/french-startup-adventigo-aims-to-save-youtube-and-others-from-legal-peril.html