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 company’s
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. Ikezoye’s filtering software quickly identified
it as the sword-training scene that begins 49 minutes and 37 seconds
into the Miramax film “Kill Bill: Vol. 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 Magic’s 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 YouTube’s 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 Central’s
“The Daily Show.”
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. “On YouTube,
identifying copyrighted material cannot be a single automated
process,” 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.
“This is capable of helping the film and TV studios comprehensively
protect their works,” Mr. Ikezoye said. “This could
put the genie back in the bottle.”
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.
“Video is much more complex to analyze, and more information
needs to be captured in the fingerprint,” 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 Magic’s
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.
“To 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,” 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 “Superman Returns,”
matched to the song “Superman,” 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 music’s venture capital
group, founded the start-up MotionDSP in 2005 to develop technology
to improve the quality of video images. But he changed the company’s
direction last year after seeing an opportunity in the filtering
business.
“The television and movie producers have learned a lesson
from Napster,” he said, referring to the music-sharing service
that first got the attention of media companies. “They are
not going to wait and see what happens.”
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 “is not a long-term solution,” said Jim Brock,
a former Yahoo executive and the chief executive of Attributor.
Rights holders “need to have these kinds of solutions across
the Internet,” 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 “Kill Bill”
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.
“We took a huge hit,” said Eric Lambrecht, Guba’s
chief technology officer. “We all know what people want
to see, but we looked at it as a long-term business decision.”
Some experts believe wide adoption of the technology is inevitable.
“As technology companies mature, they are realizing that
the rule of law is better than the anarchy in which they were
formed,” said Paul Kocher, chief executive of Cryptography
Research, a company that has studied the security of digital fingerprinting
technology.
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