Top online video service YouTube will soon test a new video identification technology with two of the world’s largest media companies, Time Warner Inc. and Walt Disney Co.
San Francisco — YouTube founder Steve Chen said Thursday the Internet giant is testing video-fingerprinting technology to guard copyrights of material posted at its globally popular website.
“Today we are experimenting with video identification tools,” Chen wrote in a blog posted online. Once accuracy is achieved, the challenge becomes speed and scale to support the millions of people who use YouTube every day.
Disney and Time Warner companies are among the entertainment industry titans Google says it is working with to craft software capable of culling copyrighted works from YouTube video clips.
Google-owned YouTube has been plagued with complaints and lawsuits by film and video owners that accuse it of not filtering copyright-protected works uploaded by users of the superstar video-sharing website.
We have been developing improved content identification for months, and we are confident that in the not-too-distant future, we will unveil an innovative solution that will work for users and content creators alike, Chen wrote.
“This is one of the most technologically complicated tasks that we have ever undertaken.”
“We are working with some of the major media companies to test what we have developed,” Chen wrote.
Media companies have eyed the wildly popular video-sharing site as a mixture of opportunity and threat as they seek to reach consumers wherever they spend time.
YouTube has come under fire from several other traditional media companies, which say it has dragged its heels in offering reliable ways to identify video clips uploaded by regular users without permission.
MTV Networks-owner Viacom sued Google and YouTube for more than $1 billion in March, charging the company with “massive intentional copyright infringement” after demanding the removal of clips of its popular shows Colbert Report and Daily Show, hosted by comedian Jon Stewart.
Nine months ago, YouTube said such tools would be made available to media companies for testing by the end of 2006. But the reliable identification of content has proved a complex task that required Google to develop its own technology tools.
The technology, developed by engineers at YouTube-owner Google, will help content owners such as movie and TV studios identify videos uploaded to the site without the copyright owner’s permission, YouTube legal, marketing and strategy executives said in an interview on Monday.
Google, which operates an eponymous video-sharing website, said it began working on fingerprinting software before buying YouTube in a $1.65 billion stock deal late last year. “We are cooking it up in our own kitchen,” Google spokesman Ricardo Reyes told media.
The so-called video fingerprinting tools, which identify unique attributes in the video clips, will be available for testing in about a month, a YouTube executive said.
These tools will be used to identify copyrighted material, after which media companies can decide if they would like to remove the material or keep it up, as part of a revenue-sharing deal with YouTube, which can sell advertising alongside it.
Once proven to work, the technology could be used to block the uploading of copyrighted clips, YouTube product manager David King said. It aims to make the tools widely available to any copyright owner later this year.
“The technology was built with the Disney’s and Time Warner’s in mind,” Chris Maxcy, YouTube partner development director, said other media companies planned to test the technology, but he declined to name the other parties. There are more that we cannot talk about right now,” Maxcy said.
These tools will be made available to all content owners later this year, YouTube executives said on Monday. “It is typically not something we talk about,” Maxcy said, adding, however: “We wanted to clear the air.”
Google and YouTube counter that they are protected by the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which simply requires it to remove copyrighted material after owners complain. YouTube contends that holding it accountable for not filtering copyrighted works posted by users threatens a key underpinning of today’s Internet lifestyle.