Much has been made of YouTube’s inability to keep pirated content off of its servers, a sticking point that has made the popular video-sharing site a very large target for media companies, especially since its highly publicized acquisition by Google in October of last year.
While the pornography filters seem to be working just fine, YouTube has had difficulty in policing its servers against other forms of copyrighted content, the most recent debacle stemming from the uploading of several complete episodes of the hit Fox series “24” – episodes which had yet to be aired on the network.
As questions arise concerning YouTube’s ability to effectively monitor its own content, the San Jose Mercury News reports that the online video warehouse has secured a deal with AudibleMagic to use its technology in filtering out copyrighted content, a move that MySpace made over a week ago.
In the Mercury News piece, Elise Ackerman gives a quick overview of just how AudibleMagic’s technology functions:
The system works by comparing the audio fingerprint of a video to a large database of copyrighted material. Founded in 1999, Audible Magic originally was focused on the problem of monitoring radio broadcasts. It purchased the technology for audio fingerprinting from Muscle Fish, a Berkeley software company that Audible Magic acquired in 2000.
Marshall Kirkpatrick at TechCrunch, however, examines the bigger picture stemming from the surfacing of this news:
What does this mean? It means that the months of assurances that YouTube had copyright filtering technology in development and about to be implemented were either a ruse to buy time or a failed effort that has collapsed under pressure today.
Hmm, now that is some interesting food for thought. Were the folks at YouTube just throwing out some smoke and mirrors for stall tactics, or were they just unable to develop adequate technology on their own?
I’ll be interested to see what information comes to light in the coming weeks surrounding this.
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