Too much legalese to get in to. Bottom line: Court says that Veoh - and presumably other video sharing sites - are protected under the DMCA provided they make a reasonable attempt to remove copyrighted content.

Peter Kafka at Alley Insider has the deets and the full court doc.

Interesting to Peter, and to me as well, that the court is getting into the distinctions between what a platform “can” do and what it was “designed” to do. I didn’t see the Napster vs. Veoh comparison coming at all. Have enough legal content, and the law gives you a pass on the copyrighted stuff as long as you make an attempt to monitor and remove it. Good deal.

Finally. At last. Phew. About F*&ing Time.

YouTube announced yesterday that they have begun testing an anti-piracy video batching database to protect themselves from copyright infringement lawsuits. The original announcement of the YouTube Video Identification system was back in June.

According to the Official Google Blog, the Video Identification system goes above and beyond the company’s legal responsibilities, but I’m not entirely sure thats the right message for them to be putting out. “We do what we can,” isn’t the warm, fuzzy sentiment that will prevent future lawsuits.

It remains to be seen how well the technology works, and how easily it can be circumvented by modifying basic elements of a video file. Additionally, the burden of the workload seems to be put on the content owners. As with the previous system, where content owners needed to find their protected material among the thousands of clips added daily, the new system requires content owners to upload their original material into the system to be scanned. For large archives, that can be decades worth of video content.

YouTube Video Identification will help copyright holders identify their works on YouTube. We have worked with Google to develop one-of-a-kind technology that can recognize videos based on a variety of factors. As its Beta status indicates, our Video Identification is brand-new, cutting-edge stuff, so we will be constantly refining and improving it. Early tests with content companies have shown very promising results. As we scale and refine our system, YouTube Video Identification will be available to all kinds of copyright holders all over the world, whether they want their content to appear on YouTube or not.

No matter how accurate the tools get, it is important to remember that no technology can tell legal from infringing material without the cooperation of the content owners themselves. This means that copyright holders who want to use and help us refine our Video ID system will be providing the necessary information to help us recognize their work. We aim to make that process as convenient as possible.

Major League Baseball is testing Teletrax digital watermarking technology reports Broadcasting & Cable. MLB becomes the first sports league to protect its content this way and joins broadcasters CBS, FOX, ABC & NBC already using Teletrax.

A division of Medialink, Teletrax enables broadcasters to embed an invisible digital watermark “by subtly manipulating the noise that naturally occurs in moving images”

The company also provides global monitoring, providing “full details of the station and location where your video was aired as well as the section of your footage used and the duration of broadcast.” So you can send them an invoice.

Teletrax has this down to a science for broadcast, showing how successful digital watermarking can be. But when you compare that to the state of online DRM, there’s still a long way to go.

Indie online film distributor Dovetail.tv has launched a facebook application allowing users to view Dovetail’s high quality independent programming without leaving the social networking site.

Dovetail has differentiated themselves by offering a high-quality solution using P2P technology. Their facebook app promises to allow users to view HD quality content without leaving the social networking site after installation of their desktop client.

Like Pando and a growing number of companies, Dovetail is offering DRM-protected downloads ensuring peace of mind for the producers on their platform as well as an outlet for them to offer their video in the highest possible quality.

For all the potential of this there are also a lot of barriers. Indie content is by nature niche and thus not the best candidate for pure p2p delivery. Consider the scalability issues Joost has had despite a much higher profile and over 1 million registered users.

Nevertheless it’s good to see outlets like this offering higher quality distribution of long form independent content to users, and interesting to see Facebook becoming an entirely new type of medium for all forms of content delivery.

The National Legal & Policy Center today posted a list of the Top 50 movies and television programs that are widely available through Google Video and YouTube, in efforts to call attention to The Big G’s lack of attention to copyright protection.

Their intent is to “expose the pirating of copyrighted material by finding and posting as many apparently pirated works as possible.”

In case anyone thought they were bluffing, they were kind enough to post a PDF with screenshots.

I am a staunch advocate for the protection of copyrights. And I’m sure that we’ll find a technologically sound and financially beneficial solution to distributing media in a digital environment.

But I would like to know, however, why they put Miami Vice at #6 when its only been viewed 663 times. Yes, I see that the chart is ordered by “Days Posted.” But 663 times over 276 days is roughly 2.5 views per day. Jesus Camp with its whopping 48 views? Bewitched with 242 views over 207 days? 1.1 view a day. It seems a stretch to say that piracy is a $2.3 billion loss for the movie industry when Miami Vice makes your Top 10 list. To be clear, I’m not supporting piracy in any way shape or form. Just pointing out a minor flaw in the way they are presenting their evidence.

CNet’s Greg Sandoval explores the impact of P2P file sharing on Hollywood movie releases. Do they build buzz or bust ticket sales?

Personally, I don’t believe that file-sharing helps build buzz. Its the result of buzz. People want to see a movie without standing in line, sitting in a bad seat, and paying for an overpriced ticket. But they download because they already have made the decision whether or not to see the film. Just not how they’ll see it.

How do you see it?

This whole Digg fiasco involving distribution of an AACS processing key used to unlock the DRM on HD-DVD and BlueRay disks has raised some big questions. In the web 2.0 era of media democracy how can intermediaries work without being held responsible for user content?

The YouTube liability argument is clear - videos that are not licensed are physically hosted on their servers. But in the case of Digg and companies like Bittorrent the content being “dugg” or the torrent being downloaded is taken from third party sources. The company simply exists an efficient hub for data transfer - And users expect it to be unfiltered.

Digg’s decision to “go down fighting” will be interesting to watch. For all intents and purposes the damage is done - the fact that the key is out there is old news - If it wasn’t mass-distributed Digg it would have been somewhere else. But the larger question of the culpability of user-generated content aggregators like Digg will need be hashed out in a courtroom.