Anti-Piracy Expectations

This week Google finally announced some new anti-copyright measures for their video-sharing website, Youtube. In a nutshell, the technology creates a "fingerprint" video clips uploaded by the content owners to Youtube, and then compares them against any new clips uploaded.

The major problem with this approach is that it puts quite a burden on content owners. HOWEVER, it is the most advanced tool available for video protection. Content protection online is difficult, because there are simply so many ways to break the rules. As such, we should expect that content protection mechanisms will be evolutionary rather than revolutionary (i.e., we can't solve this problem all at once).

What's interesting is some of the silly criticisms have been arising about this issue.

Boehm National Legal and Policy Center Chairman (U.S) Ken Boehm made one of the silliest comments I've read...

"We think it's too little, too late [...] Google is the most technologically advanced search engine company in the world and in all this interim time when they could have set filters of some sort in place, they chose nothing rather than something that may be not perfect."

Lets break this arguement down:

• Too little too late...: But then he criticizes Google for doing what would have been even less, but earlier ("some sort of filter"). It's also the most anybody has done to protect content.
  
• Google is most technologicall advanced... : Yes they are, AND they now have the most advanced piracy technology technology. Boehm then uses this as a foundation to critisize Google for using techniques that are NOT advanced (... set filters of "some sort" in place). Huh?
• Chose nothing rather than something that may not be perfect.: Actually, they did choose something, they willingly took down content that copyright holders deemed infringing... and it wasn't perfect.

Seriously Mr.Boehm... there are indeed problems with Googles approach, but a little bit of intellectual honesty would be nice, your arguments aren't consistent.

I think a good idea might be to allow copyright holders to flag videos online that violate copyright, then Google would fingerprint those videos and use them for filtering. In this case, the copyright holder wouldn't need to upload nearly as much content, making the process much less onerous.