A first post, to set the scene, I suppose this is. Let’s bring the players in: YouTube and Twitch. The first I assume many are familiar with, the second… not so much. YouTube, for those of you who don’t know, is a very popular and successful video-sharing website which was bought by Google in 2006. Users can upload videos of whatever they want, so others may view it later. Twitch is a live-streaming website, where users may capture video and broadcast it live to anyone watching their channel. In addition, these broadcasts are split into chunks and stored as videos in case anyone wants to watch them later. Together, these sites make up much of the internet’s free video-viewing market. With video comes audio, and with both come copyright.
When people may upload whatever, there’s always a concern that they’re not uploading their own material. Add the anonymity of the internet to that, and these sites are just waiting to be subject to infringement and piracy. Many of you, I assume, have visited YouTube to listen to music. Do you watch official videos? Do you watch unofficial ones? Admittedly, for some songs, there are only unofficial videos. To the copyright holders, these unofficial videos not only result in fewer sales, but these other users are profiting from their music. That’s right. YouTube gives portions of the ad revenue to uploaders, so the more views your video gets, the more you can profit. In fact, some reviewers, gamers, and musicians use this feature to make a living from their videos. It’s a nice system when things go well, but when someone’s video isn’t theirs… something has to change.
Of course, there are billions upon billions of videos on YouTube. It would be unfeasible to search through them all manually for whatever copyright violations might exist. Thus, the digital age spawned an automatic flagger: YouTube’s Content ID searches through all the videos and matches them to files in its system. It excludes the content holder’s own files, and the user can also whitelist people to whom it has given rights to use material. If there is a match, the video is flagged as potentially violating copyright. Content ID tells the person who put the content in its database that this video on YouTube may be infringing on copyright, and that content holder determines what to do about it. If they think there’s no infringement, they may remove the flag. Otherwise, they can track the video’s statistics, mute or block the video, or reroute funding from that video to themselves. In this way, copyright holders can feel secure that their content is only profiting themselves.
Now, we have a system which finds all potentially copyright-infringing material on YouTube and notifies the content holder. What do you think about it? Is it perfect? Is it faulty? In what ways? In making a system like this, what concerns are there? For the copyright holders? For gray-area uploaders? I’ll talk more about my own thoughts in upcoming posts, but this is for you. What questions do you have for me? What suggestions? What are your thoughts? I’ve set the scene, and now it’s time for you to figure out just where we’re headed…
audiocopyright 