It's been a year, but Google has produced a sketch at least of the system they propose using to keep unauthorized works off of YouTube. It's not the best solution in the world. Any creator — from the largest video producer churning out dozens of original works a day to the smallest creator with little time and less money — would need to provide their works, in total, to Google. Then Google uses what has now become the most awesome storage collection of digital works ever known (acquired at no cost) to use a fingerprinting technology to filter out unauthorized works after they've been uploaded.

Again, it is good that Google is starting to own up to its responsibilities as a company that has a business model based on others' creative works. I said as much to Dow Jones yesterday:

Patrick Ross, executive director of the Copyright Alliance, a trade group of
media companies and other copyright holders, described what YouTube's doing as "
a first step."

"In this digital age, it's very important that when businesses make money off
of other people's content, they make an effort to police that content," he said.

Ross said one concern was whether Google would offer its anti-piracy
technology only to content owners who signed licensing deals favorable to
YouTube, putting small copyright holders at a disadvantage. Google said this
technology is open to anybody, regardless of what their business relationship is
with the site.

That's true, to the extent that Google is untroubled by a new burden being placed on the rightsholder, namely providing complete copies of his or her works to Google's database.

Most of the unauthorized creative works found on YouTube can now be found on legitimate, licensed sites. Sometimes it's the site of the owner of the work (such as every single Daily Show episode on Viacom's ComedyCentral site), sometimes it's a joint venture like the upcoming hulu.com from NBC Universal and News Corp., sometimes it's a licensed service such as Joost.

YouTube can be a great place for truly user-generated works such as sleeping cats falling off the top of television sets — assuming those uploading understand that they've just transferred their copyright to Google — and it can be a good place for other works when licensed to Google, which some providers have done. When not licensed, those clips have no business being on YouTube. Hopefully this technology will be a first step toward reaching that point. 

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 16th, 2007 at 9:47 am by Patrick Ross and is filed under creators, drm, market forces. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.