Analysts Paid $11 Per Hour To Stop Internet Copyright Infringement

Some computer programs such as Audible Magic (used by YouTube and MySpace), Advestigo, Gracenote, MotionDSP, Philips, and iPharro try to distinguish if the video is copyrighted by compared video fingerprints of copyrighted material with the uploaded content and checking for a match.
However, these computer programs aren’t foolproof and when a video is in the “grey area” it is hard for these programs to identify if the video is breaking any copyright laws.
A company called BayTSP has decided to go the old fashioned root and employ video analysts at $11 an hour to find illegally uploaded content.
BayTSP most important client is Viacom. Viacom pay BayTSP $100,000 every month for the service and the takedown requests have resulted in 230,000 videos being removed from YouTube for Viacom.
Is this the best way to tackle video copyright violations online?

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.

Video Filtering to Get Standards

Motion Picture Association evaluates copyright protection tools.

April 6, 2007
By Alexandra Berzon

Judgment day, of sorts, is near for video filtering

The Motion Picture Association of America is rolling out a report within a few weeks that evaluates video-filtering software and establishes standards for copyright protection online. This sounds like good news for a nascent software space, but it also opens the door to a new set of tricky problems, insiders say.

“Once this evaluation ends, the negotiations begin,” said Brian Dunn, senior vice president for business development at the Paris-based Advestigo, which submitted technology to MPAA testing.

Why? User-generated sites like YouTube have become breeding grounds for copyrighted videos, provoking the ire (and legal arm) of copyright holders. That’s created an opening for entrepreneurs looking to cash in with tools designed to automatically catch illegal content before it appears online.

Video-sharing sites say they’re not required by law to implement filtering. But many now are choosing to do so in order to make deals with media companies. Viacom’s recent copyright lawsuit against YouTube has only added momentum.

Meanwhile, the filtering software space is chaotic. Only one company’s software―the Los Gatos, California-based Audible Magic―is widely used, and even that offers only audio soundtrack filtering so far.

Broken System
Enter the MPAA, the trade organization for film studios that has been generally aggressive on the spread of illegal videos online.

In September, it asked filtering companies to submit their tools for testing. The trade organization was seeking technology that can take a piece of video and create a unique fingerprint based on the video’s content. That fingerprint is used to accurately match and identify similar content even when the video has been severely altered, re-edited- and re-coded.

Twelve filtering software companies responded to the inquiry, and so far they have all more or less stood up to the scrutiny, MPAA officials say.

“Highly viable technologies will come out of this,” said Dean Garfield, MPAA’s legal director, who wants peer-to-peer networks, Internet service providers, and video-sharing sites to access the tools.

Video site executives agreed the standards could help in mending and building their relationships with studios.

No Panacea
But it won’t solve all the problems in this still-developing area, they say.

“The system is highly broken,” said Aaron Cohen, CEO of video-sharing site Bolt Media, recently acquired by the publicly traded GoFish. The merged company licensed filtering tools from Audible Magic after Bolt settled a copyright suit with Universal Music Group.

And the question of who will support the companies scrambling to get in on filtering is less clear.

Advestigo’s Mr. Dunn is concerned that YouTube will develop filtering tools in-house. Then a huge chunk of his potential market will vanish.

Life After Apple Lock-up

April 2, 2007
By Alexandra Berzon

Startups begin to imagine a DRM-free world.

EMI’s decision to sell unprotected song tracks on Apple’s iTunes online store had many industry observers wondering whether the record label’s stunning about-face would prompt rival music companies to follow suit.

Copyright protection software—also known as digital rights management or DRM—has long been a contentious issue dividing the record industry and online music retailers. The labels have insisted music retailers used DRM software to prevent piracy by strictly controlling how people could enjoy their music. Apple, Microsoft, and others responded with developed proprietary DRM that is annoyingly incompatible with each other’s products.

The status quo has been awkward, but it has also enabled a small but entrepreneurial group of startups to develop software and services that work with, or work around, cumbersome DRM software. But by Monday, the possibility that more music labels could follow EMI’s lead prompted many startups to begin reassessing their assumptions and business plans.

“This is a bombshell,” said John Beezer, president of the self-funded Seattle-based Shared Media Licensing. “We’ll look back on this as the moment when everything changed.”

The timing could not have been better for Mr. Beezer, who spent the past weekend preparing to shut down his online music service Weedshare, because of DRM incompatibility issues with the new version of Windows Media Player. Weedshare allowed users to play songs three times for free before having to pay, but his service wouldn’t work with the newest Windows Media software.

Now with the EMI announcement, Mr. Beezer is considering a business plan he thought wouldn’t be possible for a long time—an open music platform.

“We thought the open strategy made the most sense, but we thought the major labels would never go for it,” said Mr. Beezer. “The news about EMI really shifted that equation. Now we’re thinking, ‘Oh my god. They really will go for open formats.’”

Mr. Beezer said he is going to start working under the same assumption that many industry insiders and analysts put forth in the wake of the news—that DRM will no longer be seen as a technology that locks people into specific playback formats and limits. Instead, he predicted, DRM will evolve into a “fingerprinting” tool that monitors when consumers play songs so they can be charged accordingly.

“For startups working in the DRM space, it’s now about creating better accounting and tracking rather than locking things up completely,” said Gartner analyst Mike McGuire.

Paris-based Advestigo is one such company. Funded by I-Source Gestion, CapDecisif, and EonTech Ventures, the company makes fingerprinting and music tracking software for music labels. Executive vice president for business development Brian Dunn believes his group could well see a surge in business in the wake of the EMI announcement.

“This is a many-to-many instead of a one-to-many distribution model,” said Mr. Dunn. “Therefore, you’ve got to tag the content and follow the content, and figure out monetization.”

Christopher Levy of the closely held Austin, Texas-based BuyDRM was one of those who was not so eager to contemplate the possibilities in the wake of EMI’s announcement. His company provides DRM technology to artists and record labels and he views the EMI announcement as a desperate move by a desperate music company trying to get around iTunes’ dominance in online sales.

“This is not the bellwether for the rest of the industry,” said Mr. Levy. “As long as there is media, there is going to be digital rights management. We can’t assume the music industry as a whole will abandon this. All things of value have some protection, and that’s not going to change.”

Full article here.

MySpace Makes Nice With Music Widget-Makers

Eliot Van Buskirk 04.05.07

Full article here

...
MySpace is asking developers to register their music catalogs with Audible Magic, the company that provides copyright authorization (aka fingerprints) songs for MySpace, GoFish, Microsoft and MTVN. By doing this, MySpace execs say they're hoping to protect their company from copyright-infringement lawsuits.

...
"By using a third-party provider's database," explains Kevorkian, "MySpace can save the time and resources that would otherwise be required to build one from scratch. Monitoring posted content with a database helps to keep MySpace in the good graces of content providers and head off copyright infringement lawsuits in the process."

...
But registering a music catalog with Audible Magic isn't a simple matter: Only an artist, label or other copyright holder can submit a song for addition to Audible Magic's database of verified songs.
Vance Ikezoye, president and CEO of Audible Magic, says, "There's a very good chance that the content in question (from smaller artists on Indie911) is not registered in the database. The indie artist can contact Audible Magic through the website to register their content and establish their business rules (how they want their content treated)."

Audible Magic claims to have more than 6 million sound recordings in its database. By comparison, Apple's iTunes store contains about 3.5 million songs.

Currently, Audio Magic is the only company MySpace endorses for cataloging music. This makes Audible Magic's rapidly expanding song database increasingly valuable, as MySpace and other big online social networks rely on it (as well as databases from Advestigo, Auditude, Gracenote, Relatable and Vobile) for protection from charges of copyright infringement.

Viacom: more than a lawsuit

With the shock waves still reverberating from Viacom's billion-dollar copyright infringement lawsuit against Google/Youtube, one wonders when and where further copyright lawsuits might arise. On this side of the Atlantic, it seems possible that Dailymotion and Metacafe could be in the sights of the big content owners. Even though both are backed by big name VCs (Tel Aviv-based Metacafe has funding from Accel and Benchmark, while Paris-based Dailymotion is backed by Atlas and Partech International) they both appear to host a significant amount of copyrighted content.

Another area in which the Viacom lawsuit is having an impact is in the burgeoning sector for detecting the sources of digital content. Om Malik, the technology writer and founder of Giga Omni Media, has declared a bull market for video fingerprinting.

In Europe, Advestigo SA and iPharro Media GmBH have developed software that can find copyrighted content by identifying and matching video "fingerprints". Since both technologies require comparison with a library of copyrighted material, a key indicator of success in this area will be who forms the most partnerships. Could a consortium of media producers try to acquire one of these companies and then enforce this technology standard on anything that wants to show their content?

And surveying this space prompted an intriguing hypothetical question. People are generally wary of venture capitalists who have competing companies in their portfolio, but what if an investor backed both a video sharing site and a digital asset management company? In theory, these two companies should complement each other. However, the reality is that a video sharing site gets more traffic (and more revenue) if the copyright detection does not work well. Has anyone come across situations where seemingly complementary companies in hot new areas produce a subtle conflict of interest?

Video Fingerprinting Overview: Who's Doing What (blog post)

The New York Times dubs it "content-recognition software"; others call it video fingerprinting. The idea is to create a kind of digital dragnet that would allow copyright owners to prevent snippets of their work from being uploaded to video-sharing sites, or circulated around the Net.

Who's developing this technology? Here's my short list:
- Advestigo (FT article ... NewTeeVee)
- Attributor (WSJ article)
- Audible Magic (Post-Gazette.com ... AP article)
- Gracenote
- GUBA's Johnny (Broadcasting & Cable article ... TechCrunch posting)
- Philips (PC World article ... Philips explainer)
- YouTube

Filtering user-generated content

A Bear Sterns analyst's report on Google caused a stir early this month by estimating that its YouTube subsidiary made $15 million in all of 2006. One reason for the comparatively paltry sales was YouTube's reluctance to sell ads next to videos with uncertain provenance -- the company had to be sure the clip wasn't violating copyrights before it was monetized. Meanwhile, the entertainment industry was pressing YouTube, other user-generated content sites and file-sharing networks to police themselves, rather than forcing copyright holders to identify and complain about specific files.

These overlapping needs have created a powerful demand for software that recognizes files as they're uploaded onto user-generated sites or swapped on file-sharing networks. Not surprisingly, the tech industry has responded. The Motion Picture Association -- the global version of the MPAA -- is in the final stages of studying video-recognition technologies supplied by 11 firms and a university.

Included are a couple of usual suspects -- Audible Magic, whose customers include the iMesh file-sharing network, and Gracenote -- as well as such globally flavored upstarts as Advestigo, which was founded by a pair of French researchers, and Vobile, whose founders are Chinese engineers.

The basic approach is to assemble a database of unique identifiers for movies, TV shows, music videos and other forms of content, then compare files against this database as they're transmitted online. Within a couple of weeks, the MPA is expected to give several of those technologies an informal seal of approval.

At that point, look for more user-generated sites and file-sharing networks (e.g., StreamCast's Morpheus) to plug in content-recognition technologies and start experimenting with a variety of ways to sell advertising. According to executives at Advestigo and inside Hollywood, the rationale for identifying files has changed dramatically in the past year or so. The major studios used to view video "fingerprinting" techniques as a way to block copyrighted materially from being shared online. Now they see them as the key to building advertiser-supported business models -- they enable content owners to find out who their online audience is, as well as monitoring how ads flow to those viewers.

Much work remains to be done to complete the infrastructure -- for example, studios and content-recognition firms have to build their databases of unique identifiers. But when the MPA's report comes out, it could be the online equivalent of a gun going off in the race to port TV's business model to the Web.

MPA Content Recognition RFI Study Participant Companies

1. Advestigo
2. Audible Magic
3. Auditude
4. Gracenote
5. Intellivision
6. Magix/AudioID
7. NTT
8. Philips
9. Thomson
10. University of St Andrew, Scotland
11. VidyaTel
12. Vobile

http://opinion.latimes.com/bitplayer/2007/03/filtering_userg.html

Audible Magic on Copyright Patrol

By MICHAEL LIEDTKE.
c The Associated Press

LOS GATOS, Calif. (AP) - Vance Ikezoye didn't set out to become one of the digital revolution's top copyright cops when he first began tinkering with the technology that launched Audible Magic Corp.

At first, all he was looking for was a better way to identify songs and advertisements broadcast on the radio. But Ikezoye's ambitions have shifted with the media landscape, positioning Audible Magic to control what can and can't be watched on the Internet. Online video sites are adopting its filtering tools to prevent the kind of copyright trouble that provoked a legal battle between Viacom Inc. and Google Inc.'s YouTube.com.

"It's been an interesting ride,'' said Ikezoye, Audible Magic's 49-year-old chief executive. "We are kind of in the middle of everything, where we are part mediator and part battering ram.''
Audible Magic's system scans online files for copyrighted material, checking against a vast database of audio and video content provided by recording, movie and TV studios. After analyzing the digital fingerprints, Audible Magic determines whether the material has been authorized to be shared on a site like YouTube.

While several other startups are developing their own weapons to combat the unauthorized distribution of copyright music and video on the Internet, Audible Magic has emerged as the early leader of the policing pack. "It's like everyone has to nail their houses together right now and Audible Magic is holding a bag full of hammers,'' said Forrester Research analyst Josh Bernoff.

Privately held, Audible Magic doesn't disclose its financial results. The company employs fewer than 50 people and expects to become profitable this year, Ikezoye said. Despite its Silicon Valley roots, Audible Magic is primarily backed by a Naples, Fla., venture capital firm, Tierra Del Oro, which has invested less than $30 million in the company so far.

Although YouTube and other sites revolve around homemade videos, copyrighted content has also helped attract millions of viewers to the Web.
In January alone, 123 million people in the United States watched 7.2 billion videos online - an average of nearly two videos per viewer each day, according to comScore Inc.'s Video Metrix.
But audiences could dwindle while legal bills rise for Web sites that have been showing unauthorized video clips. That threat crystallized this month when Viacom sued YouTube and Google for more than $1 billion in a federal complaint alleging YouTube hasn't done enough to prevent its users from posting thousands of copyright clips to the site.

News Corp. and NBC Universal recently underscored their growing impatience with the unauthorized use of their video by forming a new joint venture that will distribute their TV shows and movies on the Internet.

Those actions make it more likely that sites hosting online video will have to buy copyright-checking tools from Audible Magic or one of its rivals - a group that includes Gracenote, Advestigo, Auditude and Vobile.

Another startup still in development, Attributor, is taking things a step further by developing software that is supposed to enable copyright owners to scan the entire Internet to uncover the unauthorized use of their material. "Technology like Audible Magic is necessary, but it's still not sufficient,'' said Jim Brock, a former Yahoo Inc. executive who is running Attributor. "It still doesn't get you to the finish line.''

Others remain uncertain whether Audible Magic will be able to protect video copyrights as effectively as it has done with music. "Video recognition creates some new challenges,'' said Dean Garfield, executive vice president for the Motion Picture Association of America, which is still vetting the approach of Audible Magic and 11 other anti-piracy vendors.

To make the leap to video, Audible Magic last year obtained a license for a technology called "Motional Media ID'' that was developed by David Stebbings, formerly an executive with the Recording Industry Association of America.

The company says its patented technology is fast, simple and accurate, though Ikezoye declined to provide details on exactly how it works. "We are very confident our technology will meet the needs of the marketplace,'' said Ikezoye, who was a marketing executive at Hewlett-Packard Co. before breaking away to become an entrepreneur in the late 1990s.

The list of Web sites that have recently bought Audible Magic's copyright-protection tools include MySpace.com, the largest online social network, Break.com, an online entertainment channel catering to men, and Microsoft Corp.'s Soapbox channel.

Online video site Revver.com also has been testing Audible Magic's copyright-screening tools.
YouTube's business relationship with Audible Magic remains a mystery. The San Jose Mercury News last month reported that YouTube had decided to embrace Audible Magic's copyright-checking system, but neither of the companies will confirm a deal is in place. When asked whether Audible Magic is working with YouTube, Ikezoye smiled slyly and said he couldn't talk about it. A YouTube spokeswoman said the company doesn't comment about any technology obtained from outside vendors. "As a company that respects the rights of copyright holders, we expect to continue to take the lead in providing state of the art ... tools and processes for all copyright holders,'' YouTube said in a statement.

Audible Magic already endeared itself to the entertainment industry by developing one of the first solutions for detecting and deterring music copyright violations over file-swapping networks popularized by the original Napster and its imitators. "We had to do something to stop this activity, so it's been gratifying to see how (Audible Magic) has used their technology in an affirmative way,'' said Cary Sherman, president of the Recording Industry Association of America, a trade group that has spearheaded the attack on illegal music downloads.

About 75 universities nationwide now rely on Audible Magic to monitor their networks for the peer-to-peer sharing of copyright music. That number is likely to grow as recording industry and Congress pressure university administrators to curb piracy occurring on their networks. College students accounted for more than 1.3 billion illegal music downloads last year, or about one-fourth of unauthorized activity, according to the research firm NPD Group.

In a show of its appreciation for Audible Magic's anti-piracy efforts, the music industry invited Ikezoye to attend the Grammy awards in 2005. But it's only a matter of time before loopholes are discovered in Audible Magic's copyright protections, predicted Peter Eckersley, staff technologist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an online civil liberties group. "It's going to become a futile game of cat and mouse,'' Eckersley said. "For every measure, there is always a countermeasure.''

COMPETITION: financial info

Snapshot of the main competitors for video fingerprinting:

• Advestigo (raised 4.5M€)
• AudibleMagic (estimated annual revenues: $2.5-3M)
• Guba (never been funded, grew organically and... are now for sale)
• Vidyatel (raised $3-5M end of 2002)
• Vobile (seeking for $5M as we speak)
• iPharro (raised $5M last month)

Other competitors:
Philips
NTT labs

Advestigo met sous surveillance les vidéos postées par les internautes

La société a développé une technologie pour filtrer les contenus vidéo sous copyright avant leur publication sur des sites de partage.
Hélène Puel , 01net., le 25/01/2007 à 19h35

YouTube, Google Video, DailyMotion... Les sites de partage de vidéos se multiplient. Et avec eux les problèmes de droits d'auteur liés à ces contenus. Advestigo vient de mettre au point une technologie d'empreintes qui permettra aux plates-formes de partage de vidéos de filtrer les contenus que postent les internautes, afin d'éviter d'éventuels problèmes juridiques.
Baptisée « AdvestiGate », cette technologie calcule une empreinte numérique pour chaque fichier, qu'elle compare ensuite à une base de données comportant les signatures vidéo des films originaux « copyrightés », en cours de constitution par Advestigo. « Nous sommes en train d'enregistrer les signatures de "blockbusters" et de séries télévisées", précise Christophe Tilmont, directeur marketing de l'entreprise.
Après avoir « normalisé » la couleur et le format de la séquence postée par un internaute - afin de pouvoir repérer une vidéo quels que soient son codage et sa taille - Advestigate en extrait des images clés, en général des moments de rupture entre deux scènes. Celles-là sont ensuite réunies sous la forme d'une empreinte, qu'on peut définir comme une série d'images normalisées. La comparaison de cette nouvelle signature avec celle de la base de données se fait très rapidement, en 8,5 secondes, selon les concepteurs.
Une comparaison en moins de dix secondes
L'opération de comparaison se fait avant que les envois des internautes ne soient publiés sur Internet. « Il faut savoir que la publication d'une vidéo n'est pas immédiate. Avant de la mettre en ligne, les sites de partage la redimensionnent et dégradent l'image de manière à alléger leur coût de stockage et de bande passante, développe Christophe Tilmon. Demain, ils utiliseront ce temps pour rajouter aux vidéos de la publicité. Mais aussi pour vérifier leur origine. »
Le système n'est pas nouveau. Audible Magic possède sa propre solution d'empreintes, plutôt axée sur le son. Celle-là va être utilisée par le site français DailyMotion. Chez Advestigo, on précise que les deux technologies sont complémentaires. Les deux sociétés seraient même en pourparlers.
A terme, une autre brique sera ajoutée au produit Advestigate. Elle permettra aux sites de partage de vidéos de repérer des fichiers postés identiques. En effet, un même contenu se retrouve souvent posté par plusieurs internautes sous des titres différents. Ainsi, les plates-formes pourraient fortement diminuer leur coût de stockage, en retirant les doublons.

http://www.01net.com/editorial/339648/web-2.0/advestigo-met-sous-surveillance-les-videos-postees-par-les-internautes/

Fingerprinting Videos, Music May Help Stop Piracy

2006 was a good year for Advestigo, a French company that helps guard digital assets - winning a number of prestigious awards including the Information Society Technology Award. 2007 looks like it could be an even bigger year as it rolls out its AdvestiSearch - the technology for fingerprinting digital video and music so companies like YouTube and MySpace can quickly find and remove offenders.
The launch of this technology should help Google and other search engines from future lawsuits over listing or hosting (in the case of YouTube) pirated media.
FT.com gives a good overview of the potential of this technology.

The Week in Streaming: MIDEM, MySpace, and More

At the Midem conference in the southern French Riviera city of Cannes this week, a new music licensing agency announced it has reached an agreement with international independent record labels to sell recordings on the MySpace.com and YouTube.com websites.
Independent music labels make up 30% of the global music market, but have had difficulty–with the exception of limited success on iTunes–in gaining a consistent voice in the digital music distribution space. The MySpace/YouTube is of interest on its own, but the vehicle by which independent labels will begin to speak with a unified voice–a new licensing agency called Merlin–may have significant impact on both the offline and online licensing and distribution of music.
According to a Financial Times article, the content will be sold as unprotected MP3 files on MySpace, which will allow the files to be played on any MP3 playback device. Which means it’s not only compatible with the Apple iPod, but also the Microsoft Zune and every other portable audio player on the market.
At the same conference, a small French company offered companies like MySpace, who have been sued in the past for copyright infringement, and companies like YouTube, which have narrowly averted lawsuits, a new technology designed to track down the digital equivalent of a movie or song’s “fingerprints” to root out copyrighted material that may have been uploaded to the video sharing sites. The technology, called AdvestiGate by the company Advestigo works in a manner similar to earlier technologies pioneered by encoding.com that were used to identify music CDs for cataloging purposes.
The company claims the technology will match the fingerprints of copyrighted content in its database even if the original content has been altered, although details have not been disclosed on how the technology would exempt from the filter or differentiate fair use or paid reuse of content. Even though YouTube has avoided being sued by Universal Music Group, Advestigo’s CEO seems to think it’s only a matter of time.
“Video-sharing websites are permanently at risk of litigation,” says Michel Roux, “by unintentionally distributing copyrighted content online.”
Meanwhile, a half a world away from Cannes, the French national telecom carrier, France Telecom, chose its Silicon Valley research and development office to announce the rollout of a new brand–Orange Labs–and mentioned that it is considering building its own internet advertising feed tool. The move to consolidate and brand its R&D facilities, according to France Telecom CEO Didier Lombard, was announced in Silicon Valley as further evidence France Telecom is abandoning its not-invented here mentality.
France Telecom’s move toward an in-house advertising delivery solution signifies the importance that advertising – especially rich media advertising – revenue streams can play for telcos that have both wireline and wireless networks. While the move follows the natural curve a large telco follows as it adds core services, it could have significant revenue impacts for Yahoo, which currently supplies online advertising feeds to France Telecom.
Continuing westward, news is coming out of China that legal downloads are slowly gaining an edge on pirated downloads. While sites such as the Nasdaq-listed Baidu, China’s biggest search provider, make it easy to find copyrighted material–to the extent that content can be downloaded or played directly from the search provider’s web search results page–there has been an uptick in legitimate downloads over the past few months.
This move, while slow, could be due to the fact that the Chinese government is showing more interest in curbing piracy as copyright holders have increased the number of litigations against Chinese companies, some of which the government holds a majority stake in. Even after a lawsuit by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) against Baidu was dismissed in Beijing late last year, the search company announced that it plans to set up an advertising-supported streaming media service and that it will partner with EMI, a large music company that has chosen to disassociate itself from an appeal that IFPI is filing.

By Tim Siglin, January 23, 2007
http://www.streamingmedia.com/article.asp?id=9494

Advestigo : une solution de filtrage pour les sites de vidéos

Advestigo, un spécialiste du filtrage par reconnaissance de contenu, vient d’annoncer l’arrivée de son AdvestiGATE. Cette solution surfe sur la vague des sites de partage de vidéos en ligne (Youtube, Dailymotion, ect.), pour proposer un système automatisé de filtrage de contenus copyrightés. Alors que les accords financiers se multiplient, entre les plateformes en ligne et les ayants droit, se pose du même coup la question du contrôle des flux…
Avec ce type de produit, « les ayants droit peuvent, en toute sécurité, décider où et comment ils veulent que leur contenu soit utilisé ». Cette technologie maison se nomme la Théraographie (« thèraô » voulant dire « chasser » en grec) et calcule une empreinte numérique pour chaque fichier vidéo mis à disposition. Lors de cet acte, l’empreinte est comparée avec une base existante d’empreintes d’originales et copyrightées afin d’accorder ou refuser un visa de partage… « En l’espace de quelques secondes, les fichiers contenant des copies totales ou partielles, exactes ou dégradées d'un contenu original seront identifiés et marqués ».
AdvestiGATE, fourni sur un serveur dédié au prix de 12 000 euros, gère aussi l’audio toujours par empreinte numérique. La société avait également développé dans le passé des solutions pour les réseaux P2P… un vœu pieu des majors adeptes de la riposte graduée, mais toujours contrarié par la CNIL.

Jeudi 25 janvier 2007 à 11h35, rédigé par Marc Rees

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

Eurovalley blog post
**********
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

Advestigo Offers Fingerprinting Appliance

A Paris-based startup called Advestigo has packaged its digital video fingerprinting technology in a $15,900 (and up) appliance to be hooked up to video networks (warning: link is to PDF). The company claims each box would be able to handle 3,000 uploads per day.
Video fingerprinting is in high demand at the moment, but we have little clue as to how well Advestigo’s solution works. We’ll have to check back to see if the company can sign any customers following today’s announcement.
Advestigo’s products, covered in the Financial Times today, had apparently previously drawn some interest from French copyright organizations trying to root out piracy on peer-to-peer networks. The company’s technology is currently being tested by the MPAA, Christophe Tilmont, Advestigo VP of marketing and business development, told us in an email.

Advestigo, founded in 2002, raised €3.5 million in funding from iSource Gestion, Cap Décisif, and EonTech in 2004.
See our previous coverage of Attributor’s and Phillips‘ efforts in the digital fingerprinting space. On the audio fingerprinting side, Snocap just secured a deal to sell music from Merlin, the new independent music licensing consortium.
We’ve also heard through the grapevine that many video sites are looking to Audible Magic — which acquired a license for video fingerprinting to compliment its existing audio fingerprinting business — to allay their copyright concerns.

'Fingerprint' system to scan website traffic

Financial Times article
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A Paris-based technology start-up will launch a digital video and music "fingerprint" system this week that, if adopted, could enable user-generated content websites such as YouTube and MySpace to spot and remove illegally posted copyright material.
Advestigo claims its AdvestiGate technology, developed over the past four years, could help protect the big user-generated content sites from the threat of lawsuits from Hollywood studios and other content creators.
Universal Music Group, part of Paris-based Vivendi, filed a copyright infringement lawsuit in November accusing MySpace of allowing its users to upload and download pirated songs and videos. The lawsuit also named Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, which acquired MySpace for $580m in 2005.
YouTube, the largest video-sharing web service, which was acquired by search giant Google for $1.65bn in November, has yet to face a big lawsuit in spite of repeated threats.
"Video-sharing websites, which might handle upwards of 65,000 newly uploaded clips every day, are permanently at risk of litigation by unintentionally distributing copyrighted content online," said Michel Roux, Advestigo's chief executive.
Advestigo's technology, based on complex pattern-matching algorithms, automatically filters uploaded content, comparing new "fingerprints" with a database of existing fingerprints from copyrighted material, including top Hollywood film titles and television series.
The French company claims the technology is effective even when the original content has been adjusted or altered.
The technology, which works with audio files as well as video clips, has been proved in use with many leading peer-to-peer services.
This week Advestigo said it will begin offering the technology in a $15,000 "appliance" - a box that can be hooked up to a network.
One box can handle about 3,000 video clips a day but large sites could hook dozens up together to monitor traffic on their networks.

The Financial Times Limited 2007
By Paul Taylor in New York Published: January 22 2007 02:00