[Infowarrior] - New Weapon in Web War Over Piracy

[Richard Forno]

February 19, 2007
New Weapon in Web War Over Piracy
By BRAD STONE and MIGUEL HELFT
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/19/technology/19video.html?pagewanted=print

SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 18 ‹ As media companies struggle to reclaim control over
their movies, television shows and music in a world of online file-sharing
software, they have found an ally in software of another kind.

The new technological weapon is content-recognition software, which makes it
possible to identify copyrighted material, even, for example, from blurry
video clips.

The technology could address what the entertainment industry sees as one of
its biggest problems ‹ songs and videos being posted on the Web without
permission.

Last week, Vance Ikezoye, the chief executive of Audible Magic in Los Gatos,
Calif., demonstrated the technology by downloading a two-minute clip from
YouTube and feeding it into his company¹s new video-recognition system.

The clip ‹ drained of color, with dialogue dubbed in Chinese ‹ appeared to
have been recorded with a camcorder in a dark movie theater before it was
uploaded to the Web, so the image quality was poor.

Still, Mr. Ikezoye¹s filtering software quickly identified it as the
sword-training scene that begins 49 minutes and 37 seconds into the Miramax
film ³Kill Bill: Vol. 2.²

The entertainment industry is clamoring for Internet companies to adopt the
technology for music files as well as for video clips. The social networking
site MySpace, owned by the News Corporation, said last week that it would
use Audible Magic¹s system to identify copyrighted material on its pages.
But not every Internet company is rushing to go along. The video-sharing
site YouTube, which Google bought last year, is the major holdout so far.

Though YouTube¹s co-founders said publicly that they would start using
filtering technology by the end of last year, the site has yet to do so. And
they have further angered some media companies by saying they would only use
such technology to detect clips owned by companies that agree to broader
licensing deals with YouTube.

The pressure is on. Executives at media companies like NBC and Viacom have
criticized Google for the delay. Earlier this month, Viacom asked YouTube to
remove 100,000 clips of its shows, like music videos from MTV and excerpts
from Comedy Central¹s ³The Daily Show.²

In a statement, YouTube said that identifying which video clips had been
uploaded without permission was a complex problem that required the
cooperation of the copyright owners. ³On YouTube, identifying copyrighted
material cannot be a single automated process,² it said in the statement.

The systems being developed by companies like Audible Magic and Gracenote
make use of vast databases that store digital representations of copyrighted
songs, TV shows and movies.

When new files are uploaded to a Web site that is using the system, it
checks the database for matches using a technique known as digital
fingerprinting. Copyrighted material can then be blocked or posted,
depending on whether it is licensed for use on the site.

³This is capable of helping the film and TV studios comprehensively protect
their works,² Mr. Ikezoye said. ³This could put the genie back in the
bottle.²

Audio fingerprinting technologies have been used successfully for some time
to detect copyrighted music on file-sharing networks and, to a smaller
degree, to identify music tracks on social-networking Web sites like
MySpace.

Systems that can identify video files hold even greater promise to improve
relations between traditional media companies and Internet companies like
YouTube. But the technology is not quite ready.

³Video is much more complex to analyze, and more information needs to be
captured in the fingerprint,² said Bill Rosenblatt, president of GiantSteps
Media Technology Strategies, a consulting firm based in New York. He noted
that there were also more ways to fool the technology ‹ for example, by
cropping the image.

Screening for video is also more difficult because of the sheer volume of
new material broadcast on television each day, all of which must be captured
in the database.

And deploying any type of fingerprinting technology can carry a price. Users
tend to leave filtered Web sites and migrate to more anything-goes online
destinations.

Nevertheless, some file-sharing networks and smaller video sites like
Guba.com and Grouper.com are already using more basic filters that monitor
video soundtracks and music files, hoping to appease copyright holders and
stay out of the courtroom.

Last week, they got some company: MySpace announced that it would expand on
early filtering efforts and license Audible Magic¹s audio and video
fingerprinting technology. It will use the system to identify and obtain
authorization for material from Universal Music, NBC Universal and Fox,
three media companies that have wanted more control over their content on
the site. The move ratchets up the pressure on YouTube, the largest video
site on the Web.

Hollywood, long tormented by digital piracy, is growing excited about the
possibilities of digital fingerprinting and filtering ‹ in part because it
is tired of having to ask YouTube and other sites to remove individual
clips, only to find them posted again by other users.

³To the extent you can readily and easily identify one film or TV show from
the next, it enables different licensing models and the opportunity to
protect your content,² said Dean Garfield, executive vice president of the
Motion Picture Association of America.

For now, however, audio fingerprinting is all that is widely available, and
it can fall short in some situations, like when someone pairs a song with an
unrelated piece of video.

For example, last December, one YouTube user uploaded scenes from the Warner
Brothers movie ³Superman Returns,² matched to the song ³Superman,² by Five
for Fighting of Columbia Records, a unit of Sony BMG Music.

With acoustic fingerprinting, Sony could authorize the use of the song and
get a slice of the advertising revenue the clip generates, but Warner
Brothers could not because the filter does not scrutinize video images.

Hoping to nurture the development of more advanced video fingerprinting, the
film association asked technology companies last fall to submit video
filtering systems for testing. Mr. Garfield of the association said 13
companies responded; their systems are now being evaluated.

Perhaps not surprisingly, there is now a flurry of interest in digital
fingerprinting in Silicon Valley. Sean Varah, an electronic-music researcher
who once worked for Sony music¹s venture capital group, founded the start-up
MotionDSP in 2005 to develop technology to improve the quality of video
images. But he changed the company¹s direction last year after seeing an
opportunity in the filtering business.

³The television and movie producers have learned a lesson from Napster,² he
said, referring to the music-sharing service that first got the attention of
media companies. ³They are not going to wait and see what happens.²

Attributor, another start-up based in Redwood City, Calif., is taking a
different approach to filtering. It is developing automated software that
will travel the Internet looking for copyrighted text, audio and video.

Setting up filters for each and every Web site and peer-to-peer network ³is
not a long-term solution,² said Jim Brock, a former Yahoo executive and the
chief executive of Attributor. Rights holders ³need to have these kinds of
solutions across the Internet,² he said.

Audible Magic, which is considered to be an early leader in the field,
started out with a system to recognize songs played on the radio, so it
could offer listeners an opportunity to buy the music online. The company
later adapted that technology to create an audio fingerprinting system.

Mr. Ikezoye, a former Hewlett-Packard marketing executive, recently set out
to expand into video recognition. Last year, he licensed an invention called
Motional Media ID, created by David W. Stebbings, a former executive at the
Recording Industry Association of America.

Neither Mr. Ikezoye nor Mr. Stebbings would offer details on Motional Media
ID (which identified the ³Kill Bill² clip), citing the newly competitive
environment around digital fingerprinting. Mr. Ikezoye acknowledged that it
did not work well for very short clips and said that he would probably have
to buy or develop additional technology.

Deploying any type of fingerprinting filter can have both good and bad
effects. Guba.com, a video-sharing site similar to YouTube, developed its
own filtering system, which it calls Johnny. Having won the favor of the
film industry, the company now has deals to sell Warner and Sony films on
its site.

But when Guba began blocking many copyrighted clips last April, its
popularity plunged.

³We took a huge hit,² said Eric Lambrecht, Guba¹s chief technology officer.
³We all know what people want to see, but we looked at it as a long-term
business decision.²

Some experts believe wide adoption of the technology is inevitable.

³As technology companies mature, they are realizing that the rule of law is
better than the anarchy in which they were formed,² said Paul Kocher, chief
executive of Cryptography Research, a company that has studied the security
of digital fingerprinting technology.