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.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 16th, 2007 at 10:02 am and is filed under Copyrights, DMCA, DRM, Legal, News, Piracy, User Generated, Video Portals, technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.