Finally ready to make the movie and TV studios happy, YouTube has introduced the long-awaited technology that will automatically remove copyrighted clips.
Or so they say.
You see, the studios were getting a little pissed that YouTube allow so much pirated material on its site. Make that, a lot pissed. ‘Cause…you know…Viacom sued ‘em for $1 billion for showing thousands of its clips. And then everyone else and their mother started suing...
Oops.
So YouTube said they’d do something about it.
The filtering tools allow the owners of copyrighted videos to block their material from appearing on YouTube, and give them the option to sell ads around their material if they want the clips to stay up on the site.
"It has taken until now to get it right," YouTube product manager David King says.
But how do we know they got it right?
YouTube needs the cooperation of the copyright owners for its filtering system to work because the technology requires them to provide copies of the video they want to protect so YouTube can compare those digital files to material being uploaded to its website. Without that info, YouTube has no way of knowing whether material has been legally or illegally posted to the site. So the responsibility is on the copyright owners to file every possible clip someone could post in order for Youtube to know to stop it. For someone like Universal or Warner Bros, who’ve bee in business for over 50 years, that’s A LOT OF CLIPS!
