Pirating and Copyrights of Robert Gardner

The Lowdown... VIACOM, the all owning evil giant of media today, sued YouTube for $1B last year for the use of copyrighted materials. YouTube creates a filtering program to block out all of the copyrighted materials. Owners of the copyrighted material can choose what to do.

How Copyrights work The original Author of the material refers to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The DMCA has set up rules stating that it is the uploader, not the site itself that is responsible. YouTube is not responsible for the copyright infringement, but those who re-use copyrighted material without permission.

What is a filter? A program that will weed out all of the pirated videos on YouTube. These programs are especially hard to write and develop because a video is so compressed and degraded already. All knowing Wikipedia says: Filtration is the process of using a filter to mechanically separate mixtures. Coffee Filter

Video Filtering One of the hardest filters to write a program code for. Videos can be changed slightly and the entire video is different. The YouTube system works by creating a enormous database of abstract images, then matching those with the videos.

Watermark and Acoustic Fingerprint Videos and songs today have digital watermarks in them, allowing copyrighted material to be tracked. Verizon Wireless phones can now recognize digital watermarks in music. YouTube used an acoustic fingerprint that can track infringed material. Copyright owners wanted more protection.

The New System This system is run on the basis of money generated for both YouTube and the copyright owners. YouTube instated the filtering system, which runs on the basis that the copyright owners will provide material for the video filtering process. YouTube then runs all the videos in the system through the filters. When a copyrighted video is found, the copyright owners are contacted.

The New System Cont.... Because YouTube itself acts as a free advertising agent, the copyright owners are forced to decide if keeping the video online or taking it off is more beneficial. The copyright owners can decide to provide an ad on the site with the video, generating revenue for both YouTube and the Copyright owners.

/ Dot Comment Time! “I feel especially sorry for the people who build movie montages...I still view that as original art & innovative.” -eldavojohn “Copyright holders aren't going to provide decades of anything since it's up to google to keep copyrighted content off youtube. no reason why a copyright holder needs to go through this when someone else is infringing on their rights” -alen

/ Dot Comments Cont... Pretty funny that google is trying to con people into building a digital library for them. Think about how much google has spend just trying to build a library of books, and now they're getting people to build them a media library for free! - JeremyGNJ

What do you think? How is this going to affect what you see on YouTube? Do you think it is taking away some rights of the people/users? Are there any other solutions?

Cited Sources 1&threshold=1 copyrighted-clips-on- YouTube/2007/10/16/ html bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/10/16/BU1GSQC0V.DT L