14 DAY TRIAL // Since the Google acquisition in October 2006, YouTube was continuously kept in the spotlights because numerous companies accused it for copyright infringement. However, the search giant struggled to stop this avalanche of lawsuits and announced its plans to develop a powerful function to block unauthorized content from appearing on the official page. Back in March, the Google CEO Eric Schmidt said the feature, codenamed Claim Your Content, is about to be released.
A few days ago, it was rumored that Google signed a deal with Audible Magic, a company that is able to provide an audio fingerprinting technology to detect improper videos. According to Steve Chen, YouTube co-founder, the function is available only for the partner companies such as Warner Music, Sony BMG and Universal. "Today we're experimenting with video identification tools, and will share with you a few core principles driving our technology development, past and present," the YouTube co-founder added.
Anyway, the most powerful anti-improper content owned by the online video sharing service is obviously its community of users. "Now, when it comes to spotting pornography and graphic violence, and other content prohibited by our terms of use, nothing beats our community flagging. Once a user flags a video, we immediately review it and remove it if we find a violation. But our community can't identify infringing content. We all know pornography and violence when we see them," he said.
It's obvious that YouTube needs a powerful technology to discover copyrighted content but, with no support from the community and from the partners it's extremely difficult to stop the complaints. At this time, any copyright owner is able to inform YouTube about a certain clip and request its removal.
"Many professional artists and media companies post their latest videos without telling us, while some home video-makers don't want their stuff online. Some legal departments take down a video one day and the marketing department puts it up the next. Which is their right, but our community can't predict those things, and neither can we," Steve Chen tried to explain some lawsuits.