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?

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

More on MotionDSP's technology

Details on Ikena Copyright

Ikena Copyright is a pure video technology; it does not rely on audio fingerprinting in any fashion.
Ikena Copyright's video signature system stands up to many 'attacks' such as:

• Editing: it can identify clips as small as 20 seconds
• Low-bitrate compression: it can identify clips that have been re-encoded (i.e.: from their native format to Adobe® Flash® internet video)
• Aspect ratio change: 16:9 content compressed into a 4:3 display, or 4:3 stretched to 16:9
  Cropping: cropping the sides of a video
• Video quality change: Ikena Copyright can identify videos which have been converted to B+W, or had their color distorted

Filter Startup: YouTube Audition?

Company that can fingerprint video wants to solve YouTube’s copyright woes.
March 14, 2007
By Alexandra Berzon, RedHerring

A video-filtering startup would like to play a starring role on YouTube.

San Mateo, California-based MotionDSP on Tuesday unveiled Ikena, a tool that can track content on user-generated video sites by detecting a unique set of motions in each clip. Company CEO Sean Varah said that could addresses a key claim in the $1 billion suit Viacom brought against Google this week–that YouTube should be using filtering tools to permanently block copyrighted videos from appearing on the site.

YouTube has delayed plans to implement comprehensive tools to filter copyrighted content, claiming that developing such a system is complicated and time-consuming, with many factors to consider. Viacom argues that YouTube has deliberately stalled.

That’s left room for startups to develop their own filtering software. So far the early leader is Audible Magic, which can identify content based on “digital fingerprints” in a video’s accompanying audio soundtrack. The Los Gatos, California-based startup has a licensing deal with MySpace to filter out content owned by Universal Music Group, NBC and Fox.

But MotionDSP may be ahead in developing tools that track motion in the video itself, as opposed to audio or text attached to the video.

The software is based on the company’s video enhancement technology that uses motion sensors to clean up blurry or grainy videos. With content provided by media companies, Ikena creates a “signature” or “hash” based on motion in the video. The signature gets stored in a database and matched against any similar video a user tries to put up on the site.

MySpace provided the inspiration for the product, Mr. Varah said, when an executive asked him a few months ago if the company could use its video enhancement tools to identify and filter content. But Mr. Varah said he hasn’t heard from MySpace in a while. The company, angel-backed so far, is in the process of raising venture funds. Mr. Varah said he expects to close a round of funding in the next six weeks.

Gartner analyst Allen Weiner saw a demo of the product. He was impressed to see that it could identify and block videos when users alter the images or length and then try to repost them—a common way that users try to get around detection tools.

But Mr. Weiner pointed out that MotionDSP still hasn’t demonstrated that Ikena is ready to be used by large scale video sites.
“Clearly there’s a little bit of getting from here to there,” said Mr. Weiner. “From what we’ve seen of the technology, it provides a solution to the issue at hand of copyrighted content.”

SNAPSHOT: MotionDSP (new kid on the block!)

One more contender. Interesting to notice: they move from software or bundled hardware products to service.
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Startup MotionDSP is set to announce a copyright-detection software package that uses video-fingerprinting technology.
The product will be called Ikena Copyright, and it will be offered as a service.

MotionDSP’s video-fingerprinting technology, which does not rely on audio clips or embedded text tags, is derived from the company’s video-enhancement technology, which can track and match thousands of videos per day.
It is a video technology company. As such, they are not in the copyright detection business per-se.

Quote
"We’re going to offer our technology (both video enhancement and copyright detection) as a service. We’re moving away from selling software and appliances."
Sean Varah
CEO, MotionDSP

New Weapon in Web War Over Piracy

Vance Ikezoye, the chief executive of Audible Magic, which has developed software to identify video clips on the Web. The system could help media companies as they try to enforce copyrights.

February 19, 2007
By BRAD STONE and MIGUEL HELFT

SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 18 — As media companies struggle to reclaim control over their movies, television shows and music in a world of online file-sharing software, they have found an ally in software of another kind.

The new technological weapon is content-recognition software, which makes it possible to identify copyrighted material, even, for example, from blurry video clips. The technology could address what the entertainment industry sees as one of its biggest problems — songs and videos being posted on the Web without permission.

Last week, Vance Ikezoye, the chief executive of Audible Magic in Los Gatos, Calif., demonstrated the technology by downloading a two-minute clip from YouTube and feeding it into his company’s new video-recognition system.

The clip — drained of color, with dialogue dubbed in Chinese — appeared to have been recorded with a camcorder in a dark movie theater before it was uploaded to the Web, so the image quality was poor.

Still, Mr. Ikezoye’s filtering software quickly identified it as the sword-training scene that begins 49 minutes and 37 seconds into the Miramax film “Kill Bill: Vol. 2.”

The entertainment industry is clamoring for Internet companies to adopt the technology for music files as well as for video clips. The social networking site MySpace, owned by the News Corporation, said last week that it would use Audible Magic’s system to identify copyrighted material on its pages. But not every Internet company is rushing to go along. The video-sharing site YouTube, which Google bought last year, is the major holdout so far.

Though YouTube’s co-founders said publicly that they would start using filtering technology by the end of last year, the site has yet to do so. And they have further angered some media companies by saying they would only use such technology to detect clips owned by companies that agree to broader licensing deals with YouTube.

The pressure is on. Executives at media companies like NBC and Viacom have criticized Google for the delay. Earlier this month, Viacom asked YouTube to remove 100,000 clips of its shows, like music videos from MTV and excerpts from Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show.”
In a statement, YouTube said that identifying which video clips had been uploaded without permission was a complex problem that required the cooperation of the copyright owners. “On YouTube, identifying copyrighted material cannot be a single automated process,” it said in the statement.

The systems being developed by companies like Audible Magic and Gracenote make use of vast databases that store digital representations of copyrighted songs, TV shows and movies. When new files are uploaded to a Web site that is using the system, it checks the database for matches using a technique known as digital fingerprinting. Copyrighted material can then be blocked or posted, depending on whether it is licensed for use on the site.

“This is capable of helping the film and TV studios comprehensively protect their works,” Mr. Ikezoye said. “This could put the genie back in the bottle.”

Audio fingerprinting technologies have been used successfully for some time to detect copyrighted music on file-sharing networks and, to a smaller degree, to identify music tracks on social-networking Web sites like MySpace.

Systems that can identify video files hold even greater promise to improve relations between traditional media companies and Internet companies like YouTube. But the technology is not quite ready.

“Video is much more complex to analyze, and more information needs to be captured in the fingerprint,” said Bill Rosenblatt, president of GiantSteps Media Technology Strategies, a consulting firm based in New York. He noted that there were also more ways to fool the technology — for example, by cropping the image.

Screening for video is also more difficult because of the sheer volume of new material broadcast on television each day, all of which must be captured in the database.

And deploying any type of fingerprinting technology can carry a price. Users tend to leave filtered Web sites and migrate to more anything-goes online destinations.

Nevertheless, some file-sharing networks and smaller video sites like Guba.com and Grouper.com are already using more basic filters that monitor video soundtracks and music files, hoping to appease copyright holders and stay out of the courtroom.

Last week, they got some company: MySpace announced that it would expand on early filtering efforts and license Audible Magic’s audio and video fingerprinting technology. It will use the system to identify and obtain authorization for material from Universal Music, NBC Universal and Fox, three media companies that have wanted more control over their content on the site. The move ratchets up the pressure on YouTube, the largest video site on the Web.

Hollywood, long tormented by digital piracy, is growing excited about the possibilities of digital fingerprinting and filtering — in part because it is tired of having to ask YouTube and other sites to remove individual clips, only to find them posted again by other users.

“To the extent you can readily and easily identify one film or TV show from the next, it enables different licensing models and the opportunity to protect your content,” said Dean Garfield, executive vice president of the Motion Picture Association of America.

For now, however, audio fingerprinting is all that is widely available, and it can fall short in some situations, like when someone pairs a song with an unrelated piece of video.

For example, last December, one YouTube user uploaded scenes from the Warner Brothers movie “Superman Returns,” matched to the song “Superman,” by Five for Fighting of Columbia Records, a unit of Sony BMG Music.

With acoustic fingerprinting, Sony could authorize the use of the song and get a slice of the advertising revenue the clip generates, but Warner Brothers could not because the filter does not scrutinize video images.

Hoping to nurture the development of more advanced video fingerprinting, the film association asked technology companies last fall to submit video filtering systems for testing. Mr. Garfield of the association said 13 companies responded; their systems are now being evaluated.

Perhaps not surprisingly, there is now a flurry of interest in digital fingerprinting in Silicon Valley. Sean Varah, an electronic-music researcher who once worked for Sony music’s venture capital group, founded the start-up MotionDSP in 2005 to develop technology to improve the quality of video images. But he changed the company’s direction last year after seeing an opportunity in the filtering business.

“The television and movie producers have learned a lesson from Napster,” he said, referring to the music-sharing service that first got the attention of media companies. “They are not going to wait and see what happens.”

Attributor, another start-up based in Redwood City, Calif., is taking a different approach to filtering. It is developing automated software that will travel the Internet looking for copyrighted text, audio and video.

Setting up filters for each and every Web site and peer-to-peer network “is not a long-term solution,” said Jim Brock, a former Yahoo executive and the chief executive of Attributor. Rights holders “need to have these kinds of solutions across the Internet,” he said.

Audible Magic, which is considered to be an early leader in the field, started out with a system to recognize songs played on the radio, so it could offer listeners an opportunity to buy the music online. The company later adapted that technology to create an audio fingerprinting system.

Mr. Ikezoye, a former Hewlett-Packard marketing executive, recently set out to expand into video recognition. Last year, he licensed an invention called Motional Media ID, created by David W. Stebbings, a former executive at the Recording Industry Association of America.
Neither Mr. Ikezoye nor Mr. Stebbings would offer details on Motional Media ID (which identified the “Kill Bill” clip), citing the newly competitive environment around digital fingerprinting. Mr. Ikezoye acknowledged that it did not work well for very short clips and said that he would probably have to buy or develop additional technology.

Deploying any type of fingerprinting filter can have both good and bad effects. Guba.com, a video-sharing site similar to YouTube, developed its own filtering system, which it calls Johnny. Having won the favor of the film industry, the company now has deals to sell Warner and Sony films on its site.

But when Guba began blocking many copyrighted clips last April, its popularity plunged.
“We took a huge hit,” said Eric Lambrecht, Guba’s chief technology officer. “We all know what people want to see, but we looked at it as a long-term business decision.”

Some experts believe wide adoption of the technology is inevitable.
“As technology companies mature, they are realizing that the rule of law is better than the anarchy in which they were formed,” said Paul Kocher, chief executive of Cryptography Research, a company that has studied the security of digital fingerprinting technology.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/19/technology/19video.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

MySpace to Implement Copyrighted Video Filtering

MySpace announced this morning that it is offering free indexing to any content producers who want to block users from uploading their copyrighted videos. The site has been offering audio filtering and limited video filtering since late last year. The biggest question on the table is whether and when YouTube will do the same, as it promised to do when it was acquired by Google. Other questions include those around fair use of content.

MySpace has licenced the filtering technology from Audible Magic , an acoustic fingerprinting company that acquired a video filtering technology called Motional Media ID™ in November. Motional Media was invented by David W. Stebbings, a Senior VP for Technology at the RIAA from 1995 through 2000.

The company’s technology is said to recognize unique signature vectors in seconds. Sources close to another company, MotionDSP tell us that company will soon announce a similar product that track unique patterns of motion in video footage.

The primary technical challenges faced by these companies are scaling and variable video formats and qualities. Audible Magic’s audio filtering is said to be remarkably effective - post-lawsuit implementation at P2P network iMesh , for example is reportedly free of false positives. “We haven’t seen any false positives, and we’re seeing a recognition rate of over 99 percent,” iMesh’s founder told MSNBC last year. That was the audio program, though, not the video filter.

The political cost of trying to tame the wild west, though, is still unclear. The debate over what constitutes fair use, for example, could become largely moot if one side of the debate can lock its position down with a technology filter. Critique, satire and sampling could someday survive only with the permission of the party being satirized. That would not be good.

Ultimately though it’s unsurprising that big content owners want to control their content and existing business model instead of exploring models that are radical, new and in theory less profitable. I find it unfortunate that the enforcement of a false scarcity of content is the direction things are moving. The theory is that law and order yields investment and will ultimately mean more available content.

How popular is copyrighted content online? Conventional wisdom is that it’s what drove YouTube’s growth - but a quick look at the viral videos with the most views (via Vidmeter ) and the most inbound blog links (via Viral Video Chart ) shows that original content is getting plenty of attention. That’s good to see.