YouTube To Block Copyrighted Content
YouTube has plans to begin blocking copyrighted content by September:
Google Inc.’s YouTube hopes recognition technology will be in place in September to stop the posting of copyrighted videos on the popular Web site, a lawyer Friday told a judge presiding over copyright lawsuits.
The lawyer, Philip S. Beck, told U.S. District Judge Louis L. Stanton in Manhattan that YouTube was working “very intensely and cooperating” with major content providers on a video recognition technology as sophisticated as fingerprint technology the FBI uses.
He said the company planned to have the technology in place in the fall, “hopefully in September.”
Of course, it’s easier said than done. I recently came across the new Nancy Drew movie on YouTube — while it was still playing in theaters. It wasn’t labelled as Nancy Drew, which made searching for it on YouTube’s site impossible (it was linked to on another site), but that also makes policing by YouTube very difficult. And since this seemed to be a camcorder copy made by an audience member (but still ok, quality-wise), any new pattern matching technology would probably have trouble catching it. But as long as YouTube says it is trying, I guess the movie industry will be more likely to leave them alone.
