YouTube Releases Its Copyright Protection Tools

Online video leader YouTube rolled out long-awaited technology to automatically remove copyrighted clips, hoping to placate movie and television studios fed up with the website's persistent piracy problems.

The filtering tools are designed so the owners of copyrighted video can block their material from appearing on YouTube, which has become a pop culture phenomenon in its two-year existence. They also give the owners of copyrighted video the option to sell ads around their material if they want the clips remain available on YouTube.

To find and remove copyrighted music, YouTube already uses separate filtering tools developed by Los Gatos-based Audible Magic Corp.

YouTube's previous lack of copyright protections for video content prompted Viacom Inc to sue it for $US1 billion ($A1.11 billion) for showing thousands of clips the New York-based company owned.

As YouTube's traffic soared, movie and TV studios became increasingly frustrated with the rampant piracy fuelling its popularity, though YouTube said it has followed copyright laws by removing protected video upon request.

Studios' exasperation with YouTube escalated as other popular web sites introduced filtering technology in recent months to prevent copyrighted material from being uploaded.

YouTube's critics have argued that the site turned a blind eye to flagrant piracy so it could show more appealing material to build its audience, and pump up its value. Google prized San Bruno-based YouTube so much it paid $US1.76 billion ($A1.96 billion) to buy the site 11 months ago.

YouTube has been working with Google engineers ever since to develop the tools needed to flag copyrighted video, said David King, a YouTube product manager.

Google and YouTube executives began promising the new copyright protection technology six months ago.

"It has taken until now to get it right," King said Monday.

It's still too early to tell how YouTube's new filtering system will affect the 7-month-old Viacom suit, said Mike Fricklas, Viacom's general counsel. "We are delighted that Google appears to be stepping up to its responsibility and end the practice of infringement," he said today.

YouTube now needs the cooperation of copyright owners for its filtering system to work, because the technology requires copyright holders to provide copies of the video they want to protect so YouTube can compare those digital files to material being uploaded to its web site.

This means that movie and TV studios will have to provide decades of copyright material if they don't want it to appear on YouTube, or spend even more time scanning the site for violations.

"We really need the content community to work with us," King said. "We need them to help us help them."

Without the help of copyright owners, YouTube has no way of knowing whether material has been legally or illegally posted to the site, King said, because copyrighted video is sometimes provided by the legal owner for promotional purposes.

But YouTube's critics have long derided this defence, arguing that it doesn't take a legal expert to spot some of the pirated material cropping on the web site. "If there has been a clip from 'American Idol' posted to the site by Joe Schmo in Oklahoma instead of Fox, you can be pretty sure it's not supposed to be there," said Rob Gould, vice president of marketing for Broadcaster.com, a rival video site.

YouTube said it has been encouraged by early tests of its filtering system with nine content providers. Only two of the test participants, Walt Disney Co and Time Warner Inc, were willing to be identified.

Messages left with Walt Disney and Time Warner weren't immediately returned today.

The system found 18 copyright violations over a limited 10-day trial of the filtering tools involving one of the test participants, King said.

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Integrating YouTube Add-On Into Google Earth

Google is bringing the world of online video and map-making closer together by allowing users of its Google Earth software to watch and hear YouTube videos mapped to specific locations.

Google is offering a new YouTube video overlay on top of its Google Earth three-dimensional visualisation software, which combines satellite images, maps, terrain and buildings of the world.

By allowing YouTube creators to geographically locate their videos on a map of the world, Google enables internet users to zoom in on locations around the planet and watch YouTube tied to that place.

For example, travellers to Maui might find videos of surfing, snorkelling or exotic fish, while virtual visitors to Chamonix-Mont Blanc can watch mountaintop ski videos in the Alps.

Google Earth users can already view user-contributed photos uploaded to Panoramio, a photo-mapping service Google acquired in May. In the case of YouTube videos, video creators assign geographical information to their works - a process also known as "geo-tagging" - as they upload them to the site.

Google Earth users can watch but not geo-tag videos, a Google spokeswoman said.

Virtual Earth from Microsoft and Yahoo Maps already offer the ability for users to annotate maps with links to websites, photos and videos.

But by allowing YouTube creators to tag their videos as they upload them, Google Earth could accelerate the move to tie together maps with online videos. In under two years, YouTube has emerged to become the world's dominant video-sharing site.

Similarly, Yahoo's popular photo-sharing site Flickr.com counts more than 28 million geo-tagged photos since it introduced a mapping feature more than a year ago.

The company recommends users download the latest version of Google Earth, a software application that users must install on their computers. More details on mapping YouTube videos can be found in a company blog post at: http://tinyurl.com/3ygojz/.

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Digital Black Market, Where You Get Anything Soft

ONE gets the sense from chatting with Canadian Gary Fung that he is waiting for the tide to change. Great expectations are imbued in his answers, as if a single sweep of the moon could change his website from a black market to a media warehouse, convert his profile from digital pirate to entrepreneur, and turn the legal threats he receives into partnership offers.

The 24-year-old has ample reasons for hope. The website isoHunt.com, which he created to help visitors find downloadable BitTorrent files (often containing illegally copied movies, music or software), has grown to 12 million visitors a month in just four years. While he won't disclose earnings, he says he still earns a profit despite a recent $33,000 hardware upgrade, $6640 each month for hosting, and legal fees that he has estimated at $22,000 a month.

But perhaps the greatest promise lies in the shifting sands of media distribution, stirred by disruptive models including Napster and YouTube, which have many experts believing that the shared processing power of peer-to-peer (P2P) networking is the inevitable path forward for mainstream media.

Mr Fung longs for the day when big media players become buyers rather than a barrier.

"BitTorrent really helps make content distribution cheaper and faster," he says. "The natural progression, as we've seen with YouTube and MySpace, is a lot more media distribution is going to be done online, and that's going to converge with the client and P2P technologies."

He envisions a model for fee-based "premium" torrents, where corporations distribute higher-quality torrents than those currently uploaded by amateurs, using corporate bandwidth as well as the scalable efficiency of P2P networks to deliver downloads faster. Yet aside from some pay-per-download partnerships at BitTorrent.com, the entertainment industry has been slow to embrace P2P technology.

While Mr Fung waits for success and recognition, his court date awaits him. In February 2006, a lawsuit was initiated against isoHunt.com by the Motion Picture Association of America, an advocacy group representing entertainment giants including Warner Bros and 20th Century Fox. The MPAA press release cites a study by Smith Barney estimating losses of $US5.4 billion ($A6.3 billion) due to film piracy in 2005. "Mr Fung has chosen not to enter into any negotiations with anybody, but rather to steal that creativity and to use it for his own ends in an unlawful manner," MPAA spokesman John Malcolm said in a televised interview.

Unlike many small enterprises that the MPAA has litigated into extinction, Mr Fung has dug in his heels, hiring a Los Angeles-based legal firm to represent him.

As a portal to more than 500 terabytes of torrent files, isoHunt.com is an obvious target. The distributed nature of P2P sharing, in which hundreds of users will simultaneously upload and download the same file with each other, is a daunting challenge for the MPAA. Its strategy has been to attack the enablers, such as newsgroups listing torrent file locations and search engines that index torrent files.

Mr Fung maintains that his site is nodifferent from a typical search engine like Google or Yahoo. IsoHunt.com is a searchable index of files shared by millions worldwide. When you find and connect to the latest blockbuster film on isoHunt.com, you can download a small torrent file, but this file only contains information on where the actual media content will be downloaded from. "It's all search engines," he says, pointing out that you can also find torrent files by searching Google's index.

Bolstering his defence, Mr Fung employs a copyright policy modelled after the Digital Millennium Copyright Act created by US Congress in 1998, a stricter policy than required under Canadian law. When violations are submitted, he removes the listing from the search engine index, a process similar to Google's for handling copyright complaints, but with greater efficiency. "Google's process is to return documents through snail mail, whereas we use email," Mr Fung says.

Mr Fung is confident he'll win his case. But that potential outcome probably won't erase his frustration with the litigious antics of an industry that, he feels, suppresses innovation in order to save a distribution model in need of reinvention. "I think copyright holders will have to accept the internet as a new way of distributing content and not just look at it as a liability," he says.

For now, it's a David and Goliath-like battle. Mr Fung is accountable to perhaps even more imposing advisers, his parents. He lives at home with his parents who emigrated from Hong Kong to British Columbia, Canada, 13 years ago. "I've explained what I can to them," he says. "I think the copyright issue is something that's going to come up more and more with the internet and I think they understand that I'm already doing what I can."

Mr Fung's persistence is evident, but his motives are less clear. It's hard to tell whether current profit, future potential or a simple love of new technology drives him. One thing is clear - the hobby he began as a computer science student at the University of British Columbia has become a day job, taking more than eight hours each day. In perhaps the same way that Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web became Yahoo, Mr Fung's enterprise has changed from a hobby to a business based on an enthusiastic community of early-adopting users.

With his name high on the MPAA's most-wanted list, one wonders how much long-term career risk the young man is taking on. Phil Morle, CTO of online storage company Omnidrive, has an answer for that. He cut his teeth in P2P with a popular client Kazaa, a role that earned him fame in P2P circles but also earned him an appearance in Australia's Federal Court in 2004.

He believes innovation will go far in the marketplace.

"P2P platforms were the origin of the two-way web," Mr Morle says. "People who have worked in the fires of P2P understand how the web is changing and will never be out of work on the modern internet."

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YouTube Make Moves to Pacify The Thai King

In an attempt to pacify the Thai King, paving the way to the ban on the website being lifted, YouTube is likely to remove all video clips deemed insulting to Thailand's king.

The popular video-sharing site, owned by Internet giant Google, has been blocked to Thai users since early April, when clips showing digitally-altered images of revered King Bhumibol Adulyadej began appearing.

Asked whether Google would remove the clips, Vissanu Meeyo, a spokesman for the information ministry, said: "It is likely."

He was responding to reports on the Bangkok Post newspaper's website that the information minister has received a letter from Google's vice president vowing to delete all clips considered offensive to the monarch.

Vissanu told AFP that information minister Sitthichai Pookaiyaudoom would hold a press conference on Friday to disclose the details.

Thailand's army-backed government had considered suing YouTube over charges of lese majeste -- insulting the monarchy -- a serious crime here that carries up to 15 years in prison.

The government, which came to power after a September coup, has been blocking YouTube since the first clip showing the king next to a photograph of feet, considered deeply offensive in Thailand, appeared in April.

The number of clips lampooning the king mushroomed after news spread around the world that Thailand had reacted by banning YouTube.

Thailand's 79-year-old king, almost universally adored by Thais, is the world's longest-reigning monarch, and one of the few who is still protected by tough laws that prohibit any insult against the royal family.

The YouTube ban came a week after a Thai court jailed a Swiss man for 10 years for insulting the monarch by vandalising his portraits.

But the king later pardoned the man, who was then deported from Thailand.

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