Fingerprint Tech Waits for a Grand Entrance

Video sites such as Microsoft’s (MSFT) Soapbox and MySpace already employ fingerprinting technology from provider Audible Magic, and Veoh has said it will implement fingerprinting this month. A Dailymotion spokesperson clarified that the site will continue to use Audible Magic for audio fingerprinting, but is adding in Ina for video fingerprinting. He emphasized that the initial Ina rollout on Dailymotion is only in France, though the company expects it to be implemented across all versions of its sites by 2008.

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?

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…

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.

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

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.

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.

MySpace Launches “Take Down Stay Down”

Another move to stop media companies from suing MySpace: they’re launching “Take Down, Stay Down” today, which prevents videos being uploaded again if they’ve already been removed at the request of a copyright holder. The service is available to all content owners.

The technology, you can probably guess, is powered by Audible Magic - a content protection service that’s signing virtually all the video sites as they dodge lawsuits left and right. The tool joins other copyright protection tech on MySpace, like audio fingerprinting of tracks on MySpace music, video filtering and an automated take down system.

Video-Sharing Web Site to Combat Piracy With Digital-Fingerprinting Technology

France's Dailymotion SA says it will begin blocking users from putting pirated clips on its video-sharing site by using so-called fingerprinting technology from Audible Magic Corp.

The move represents an effort by closely-held Dailymotion, a popular site accessed by users around the world, to distance itself from the uploading and viewing of clips from TV shows and movies without their copyright holders' permission.

Eyespot Chooses Audible Magic for Media Protection

Eyespot, the online community for video mashups, has partnered with Audible Magic to offer copyrighted music content to be available to users for remixing.

Eyespot is hoping that this deal, with the digital protection of Audible Magic, will entice media companies to offer up their content for Eyespot users. This of course is an attempt to create a middle ground for users and media companies, circumventing the kind of woes that YouTube has racked up. Using Audible Magic’s content recognition solution with the Eyespot platform allows music to be legally available for remixing. As music scoring is very popular with the Eyespot community, this partnership with Audible Magic protects everyone involved, especially the record holders, who get to decide what songs will be available for mixing. This is good for promotional material as well.

Eyespot will also be giving administrative moderation tools to copyright holders, to filter out any inappropriate media before mashups are available to the larger community for sharing and embedding. This should alleviate some of the issues many big brand companies have had in the past with contests that put their name on the line by opening it up to the UGC crowd. Eyespot already has several media partners including Paramount Pictures, the NBA, and Jive Records, among others.

Audible Magic has become a popular choice for several companies as their anti-piracy services protect copyright holders in the face of massive media sharing. Some of their clients include MySpace, Grouper and Viacom. Audible Magic’s corporate partners include EMI, Sony/BMG and Warner Music Group, among others.

Anticipating Google’s ‘Claim Your Content’

“Claim Your Content” is “not a filtering system” that will block uploads, said Google CEO Eric Schmidt, responding to a question from RBC Investments Jordan Rohan during the press conference call announcing the results of Google’s earnings for the first quarter. “Google is building a tool which is called Claim Your Content, and it allows publishers to somewhat automate the takedown process.”

DMCA compliance is the focus of the project, and “will address many of the operational complaints people are making about the workload that the DMCA has put on them,” Schmidt explained.

Companies like Revver employ a staff to police content on the site, and it’s clear that YouTube has the ability to quickly take down pornography. But Google is notoriously loathe to employ meatware solutions, and in this case may neatly avoided the issue by shifting the unprofitable policework onto the backs of rights holders.

Given this information, it sounds like rights holders will flag a clip and then somehow prove that they’re the owner; once verified, Google may use technology like Audible Magic to help identify clips with similar content as they’re uploaded; owners can then review a selection of potentially unauthorized clips and flag infringers; YouTube could then automatically pull the clip and send the necessary form letters via email to the parties involved.

Schmidt’s remarks indicated that the system won’t be perfect, only that “it addresses vast majority of complaints.”

Policing Web Video With 'Fingerprints'

Sharing Sites Say Technology

Could Help Them Identify,

Remove Unauthorized Clips
By KEVIN J. DELANEY, BROOKS BARNES and MATTHEW KARNITSCHNIG

April 23, 2007

Can "fingerprinting" bring a truce to the Web's video-copyright wars?

The technology is based on the premise that any video content has unique attributes that allow it to be identified even from a short clip -- just as a human fingerprint identifies a person.
Proponents of fingerprinting technology say it can help spot TV shows and films that are posted on video-sharing sites such as Google Inc.'s YouTube without their owners' permission, so the sites can remove them or share advertising revenue. That's a significant development amid copyright battles between media and technology companies, including Viacom Inc.'s $1 billion suit against Google filed in March. But a series of legal, technical and financial issues remain to be solved even as video sites including Google, News Corp.'s MySpace Video and Microsoft Corp.'s Soapbox, amid pressure from media companies, are testing fingerprinting or putting it in place.

Google's YouTube every day takes in hundreds of thousands of video clips, from amateur pet videos to clips of commercial movies and TV shows, that are uploaded by consumers. The company has struck deals with some copyright holders, such as the United Kingdom's British Broadcasting Corp., to run their videos and share some ad revenue. And it says it will remove any content that is posted without the copyright holders' permission when it receives specific complaints. But Google has said it needs media companies' involvement because on its own it can't distinguish between video that the copyright holders want posted and material posted without the owners' permission.

That's because Google doesn't know if the user uploading the video truly holds the copyright to a work or if the description the individual provides of the material is accurate. Some consumers, for example, spell the names of TV shows backward in the titles of pirated clips they upload in order to thwart detection by media companies.

Fingerprinting technology, by analyzing the audio or video tracks of a clip, could alert YouTube to the presence of material that a media company has registered as its own -- regardless of who uploads it or what they title the clip.

General Electric Co.'s NBC-Universal says it plans to participate in a test of fingerprinting on YouTube that it expects to start shortly. Technical staffs from the two companies are working together and they hope to have results by this summer, according to NBC.

People familiar with the matter say that Google is using fingerprinting technology from closely held Audible Magic Corp. of Los Gatos, Calif., as it separately pursues an internal effort to build its own. NBC was chosen for a Google test, which NBC expects to take place from April through June, partly because it understands the difficulties of such technology, according to one person familiar with the matter.

A YouTube spokeswoman said it looked forward to working with a variety of content owners on "content management technology," but declined to comment on the specifics of any tests, timing or technology being used. YouTube announced last fall it planned to introduce content-identification technology by the end of 2006 as part of partnerships with CBS Corp. and others. Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt later said fingerprinting technology was an answer to copyright concerns, but that it was difficult, which prompted some media companies to complain Google was dragging its heels.

NBC has been agitating for Google to move faster to put a fingerprinting system in place, contending in recent months that the Internet giant hasn't made battling piracy a priority. Now that Google is starting a test, the media company has for the moment tabled any plans to join Viacom in pursuing legal options. "We see progress," said NBC General Counsel Rick Cotton in an interview. CBS says it is also having "constructive conversations" with YouTube about fingerprinting.

Mr. Cotton and other media executives believe the fingerprinting pendulum has started to swing in their direction. In particular, they cite the piracy-protection component of a new NBC Universal-News Corp. joint venture to distribute TV shows and movies on the Web. In return for allowing viewers to watch their programming on Time Warner Inc.'s AOL, Microsoft, MySpace and Yahoo, the two big media companies got the Internet firms to agree to proactively screen for pirated video. "That removes entirely the notion that this is so technically difficult that it can't be done on a large scale," says Mr. Cotton.

AOL says it isn't using fingerprinting technology, but is willing to do so once a standard emerges. Yahoo isn't currently, and declined to comment on any future plans.

At the same time, some media executives say Google's plans don't go far enough, because Google has said it won't use fingerprinting to block clips from being placed on the site, something known as "filtering." Instead, Google is expected to use fingerprinting to flag pirated clips to the content owners, which then have to request they be removed. "It sounds like some kind of crazy lost and found," a senior executive at one of the big media companies says. "It's not going to be enough," says another.

Lawyers for the media companies say that Google finds itself in a conundrum: It wants to appease the content owners it views as important partners for YouTube but is concerned that filtering might increase its liability for copyright infringement claims. The YouTube spokeswoman said, "The law is clear, copyright owners have the responsibility to identify infringing material they want removed," adding that YouTube will continue to exceed its own responsibilities under the law while letting people upload video easily and quickly to the site.

Video-sharing sites such as YouTube say they are protected from liability for copyright claims under "safe harbor" provisions in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998. But, under the DMCA, sites that have "actual knowledge" or control of infringing content can lose such protections. "What these filters do is potentially create more knowledge, more awareness of what's going on," says Fred von Lohmann, senior intellectual-property attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco. "There is some residual risk that you could lose the safe-harbor protections if you have too much of that kind of knowledge."

Mr. von Lohmann said Google's expected approach of flagging content for owners to review and request removal is a plausible middle ground. Some fingerprinting companies such as Audible Magic say their role as an independent third party could also resolve sites' concerns about having knowledge of piracy that could endanger their protection from liability. Microsoft, for one, says it is using fingerprinting technology from Audible Magic to proactively block clips from being posted to its Soapbox video-sharing site without permission and also providing content owners with tools to request removal of clips that slip through.

With Audible Magic's system, media companies provide copies of their music, TV shows and films that it analyzes, adding their fingerprints to a central database. Video-sharing sites can use Audible Magic software to extract fingerprints for clips that users upload, and then look in Audible Magic's database for a match. Other fingerprinting systems work similarly.
Some sites have raised questions about the efficacy of current filtering technology, particularly when it's used on a mass scale and applied to the clips of varying length and quality users upload. A person familiar with the expected NBC-Google test says the Audible-Magic-based technology being used is imperfect and could frustrate media companies when clips slip through.
The Motion Picture Association of America, a proponent of fingerprinting, has been testing technology from 12 organizations. "One of the things we've been impressed with is it actually works," says Dean Garfield, chief strategic officer at the MPAA, the Hollywood lobbying group.
Audible Magic Chief Executive Vance Ikezoye says his company's fingerprinting technology, whose users include MySpace Video, Sony Corp.'s Grouper, Break.com and GoFish Corp., is more than 99% accurate when it's used to examine a clip where the image and audio quality aren't degraded. Audible Magic's fingerprinting, originally designed for use with music, looks primarily at the audio tracks and requires a TV or film clip to be about 20 to 30 seconds long minimum to reliably analyze it. The company says it is testing technology that also examines the video component of the clips.

Audible Magic charges sites a monthly fee for its service, which it says can add up to about $1 million annually in some cases. But it and other fingerprinting companies say the business models for their services aren't totally worked out.

Yangbin Wang, chief executive of Vobile Inc., a closely held Santa Clara, Calif., video-fingerprinting start-up, says the video-sharing sites that pay to use the technology aren't always motivated to fork over premium fees for the best services. Mr. Wang believes the issue could be resolved when fingerprinting is used as part of licensing pacts where video sites and content owners share ad revenue on clips they identify.

Even fingerprinting proponents, however, acknowledge it's not a silver bullet to media companies' copyright headaches. For starters, users could find pirated videos on sites without it. "I suspect people will try to find -- and will find -- a workaround," says the MPAA's Mr. Garfield.

Original article here
Write to Kevin J. Delaney at kevin.delaney@wsj.com, Brooks Barnes at brooks.barnes@wsj.com and Matthew Karnitschnig at matthew.karnitschnig@wsj.com

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.

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.

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.''

Microsoft takes Soapbox private again; will add Audible Magic copyright filtering

Soapbox on MSN Video is leaving beta for a copyright tune-up. The Microsoft user-gen site needs an estimated 30-60 days to implement and test proactive filtering using Audible Magic, spokesman Adam Sohn said.