OPINION: Filtering YouTube
By Paul Sweeting -- Video Business, 10/19/2007
OCT. 19 | THE DIGITAL-RIGHTS management wars more or less officially entered a new phase this week with the unveiling of Google’s long-promised content filtering system for YouTube.
Paul Sweeting is editor of Content Agenda
Google’s move was followed two days later by the release of a “statement of principles” on filtering by a group of major media companies and YouTube wannabes that called for more stringent procedures than Google is offering for keeping copyrighted content off user-generated video platforms.
The timing of the two announcements was obviously not a coincidence.
“The timing of the [Google] announcement is interesting,” Viacom CEO Phillippe Dauman told the Web 2.0 conference on Thursday, the same day the media companies announced their filtering plan. “They knew about the announcement we made today. Google is a very high quality company [with] a lot of very, very smart people. They can do things very quickly when they want to.”
Viacom and its compatriots, of course, were hoping to create momentum toward a de facto industry standard for filtering with their announcement.
Had Google waited, it risked appearing to buck the emerging “industry consensus” when it unveiled its less stringent filtering system, rather than as a “distribution partner” for the media companies diligently and sincerely working to develop technology to protect their copyrights.
The impetus for all this maneuvering, apart from the rapid growth of user-generated media itself, is the recent advances in the technology for digital fingerprinting, content identification and content blocking.
“We recognize that no system for deterring infringement is or will be perfect,” the preamble to the statement of principle declares. “But, given the development of new content identification and filtering technologies, we are united in the belief that the Principles [sic.] set out below, taken as a whole, strike a balance that, on a going-forward basis, will result in a more robust, content-rich online experience for all.”
Not exactly, “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” but you get the point.
AS ALWAYS, though, the technology is (comparatively speaking) the easy part. The hard part is agreeing on when and how it should be used and the business arrangements it should support.
And that’s where the real battle line between Google and the media companies is being drawn.
Google’s proposed filtering system relies on identifying copyrighted content in YouTube clips by comparing their digital fingerprint against a vast database of digitized content provided by copyright owners.
Google says it can flag matches within a few minutes of a clip being posted, allowing the copyright owner to make a decision quickly whether to permit the particular use, remove the clip from the site or channel it into some monetization scheme such as adding advertising to it.
As the media companies made clear in their statement, however, they would like to see their content kept off the Web in the first place without their permission.
The first principle listed in Thursday’s press release is the “Implementation of state of the art filtering technology with the goal to eliminate infringing content on UGC services, including blocking infringing uploads before [sic.] they are made available to the public.”
The issue isn’t purely technological. There are inevitably policy and legal implications to filtering content before or after it appears on the Web.
Blocking content before it can be posted presumes that any such use, on its face, would be infringing—an assertion many legal experts would dispute.
Allowing material to appear on a site first, before asking questions, however, means it can easily be downloaded and copied by users before being removed, defeating the purpose of filtering.
Ultimately, the filtering debate is about whose rights are paramount. And that’s not a question technology is going to resolve.
Paul Sweeting is editor of Content Agenda. Get more of Sweeting's analysis here.
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