Bringing An End To The Online Video Copyright Wars
Just about a week after Google’s chief executive, Eric E. Schmidt, said that developing a system that could identify video clips with 100 percent accuracy was virtually impossible, Google is ready to unveil a system that, in it’s final avtaar, would allow media companies to prevent their clips from being uploaded to YouTube without permission. No doubt this comes as a reaction to the $1 billion copyright infringement suit filed by Viacom against YouTube and Google in March.
While the system is still a work in progress, this would help to take some of the heat off from Google. The video identification service requires media companies to submit their digital video files to Google. Based on these media files, Google would create a digital fingerprint for each file, which would be uploaded to a central database. Everytime that a user uploads a new clip, the clip’s fingerprint would be matched against the fingerprints in the database thus ensuring that no copyrighted files were being uploaded. Alternatively, such clips could be promoted if required by the company hence leading to another revenue stream for Google.
Now to see how well it works.