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?

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?

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

SNAPSHOT: iPharro (update)

Rights management based upon video fingerprinting

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• German startup
• Commercializes five years of academic research on video recognition.
• 10 employees.
• The company’s video detection technology is based on isolating similar objects and colors to mimic human seeing.
• Main customers: Nielsen Media Research, the government of Singapore’s content rating division, TV stations in Cyprus
• UGC leads: Break.com

Quote
iPharro CEO David Fisher, whose background is in TV industry rights management, said “Google and them will realize just catching the video is the first step; OK now what, who owns the rights?”
He contended iPharro has a more comprehensive solution, with established systems for dealing with the nuances of what payments should be distributed to whom.

SNAPSHOT: iPharro

iPharro technology enables video content to be monitored and identified more quickly and efficiently than is possible with the human eye.
The fully automated process uses specialized software to analyze video clips and immediately identify them by comparing to a database of known video information. Since every video is different, each has its own "fingerprint," that is, a set of unique, readily identifiable characteristics. Potentially billions of these fingerprints can be efficiently stored in a database for quick comparison on demand.

Competing technologies often rely on the placement of earmarks or watermarks within content prior to distribution. Many of these watermarks are proprietary, meaning that outsiders interested in monitoring or tracking the content will be unable to do so. More than this, older legacy material which lacks watermarks cannot be tracked and embedded watermarks can be stripped off. iPharro avoids the pitfalls associated with this content identification technique by focusing on the characteristics of the content itself.

The result is a robust, scalable system, capable of recognizing video clips as they are uploaded / downloaded or within preexisting repositories of video content.

Copyright Protection

iPharro is on the forefront of digital asset management, helping content providers and distributors to protect valuable video content.
User-content generated sites, like YouTube and Dailymotion, unintentionally store vast amounts of illegal content. According to the US Patent and Trademark office, the US market alone loses $250 billion per year in revenues due to Internet piracy. iPharro technology can accurately and efficiently monitor and detect specific sequences that correspond to copyrighted material. This offers both content providers and distributors an added layer of protection.

Media Research

iPharro technology offers media players new and innovative ways to understand the marketplace.
Beyond just identifying video content, our technology can recognize and track alternations that have been made to preexisting video clips. Nielsen Media has already discovered the practicality of this, using the iPharro system to help monitor variations, like price or product packaging, in video advertisements.

Further, by monitoring multiple television channels in real time, iPharro technologies will enable Nielsen to track the placement of commercial advertisements. This will give Nielsen's customers an accurate picture of how the market for commercial advertisements is shaped, i.e. which commercials and types of commercials are played at which times during the week.

Video Searcher iPharro Gets Funding

Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics spinoff iPharro Media GmbH (formerly Semiotix) has raised €4M ($5.1M ) from Triangle Venture Capital in Germany.

The startup say it has developed software to identify video material using several search methods. What makes it special, it says, is that the system does "not depend on embedded information such as earmarks or fingerprints, but rather uses a content clip-to-clip comparison." It does not rely on metadata or text for the search.

And it claims to be able to detecting "specific sequences in the vast amounts of legacy motion picture material illegally stored on public sites..."
The company is targetting copyright owners.
Nielsen Media Research was its first customer.