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?

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

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.