You may have seen the above video which cleverly uses Disney clips to describe the complexities of fair use law, a tool that enables media critics and audiences to quote and comment upon existing copyrighted material. The article below describes a new technology being developed in partnership between Disney, Time Warner and YouTube/Google to embed video with some kind of finger printing to detect copyright violations on uploaded video. The problem I have with these kind of algorithms is that they are completely insensitive to context. I fear a video like the above would simply be flagged and removed for violations without the subtle interpretation the law requires. I think this is a scary development so I hope hackers find a way to destroy it.
YouTube to test video ID with Time Warner, Disney | Reuters:
The technology, developed by engineers at YouTube-owner Google Inc. (GOOG.O: Quote, Profile, Research), will help content owners such as movie and TV studios identify videos uploaded to the site without the copyright owner’s permission, legal, marketing and strategy executives at YouTube told Reuters in an interview on Monday.
The so-called video fingerprinting tools, which identify unique attributes in the video clips, will be available for testing in about a month, a YouTube executive said.
Technorati Tags: copyright, fair use
0 Responses to “Can technology kill fair use? Or, those darned algorithms!”