23 February 2007 | Author: C. Philip

Google take steps to combat video piracy

Eric Schmidt, Chief Executive of Google, announced yesterday that the internet search giants will soon be offering anti-piracy technologies to help copyright holders prevent unauthorized video sharing across their users. This development has been brought about by the substantial levels of media industry criticism of Google over their video sharing website YouTube. Google have indicated that the development of these antipiracy technologies will be an immediate priority.

As yet, Google have not confirmed when they will be rolling out the new technology. Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO said, "It is not some product you can just build and leave alone". Schmidt also said that Google plans to make video antipiracy tools generally available to copyright owners.

The risk with this new screening proposal is that YouTube's audience may simply be driven to other sites where copyright violations are unrestricted - as has happened many times in the past when copyright protection has been forced upon a program or service.

YouTube is "definitely going to lose popularity,'' said Jesse Drew, acting director of the technocultural studies program at University of California-Davis. "These things become popular because they are underground, free and accessible."

Problems with piracy are so far spread across the internet that Google's attempt may not make any difference in stopping the offending pirates. To put video site standards into perspective, compare YouTube to other, currently smaller competitors - YouTube imposes a 10-minute limit on uploaded clips, but sites such as Dailymotion.com in France and Peekvids.com in Denmark screen full-length movies and pirated TV episodes.

Copyright holders have battled against media pirates since the internet first acquired mass popularity. In September 2006, YouTube agreed to begin filtering videos but the implementation of a filtering system was delayed. Earlier this month, Viacom demanded that YouTube remove more than 100,000 Viacom video clips from the site after the two sides failed to reach a distribution agreement.

However, identifying copyrighted material has its difficulties. Due to various issues such as different methods of encoding, size of files and copyrighted media from multiple companies being present in the same, identifying ownership can be a complex task.

At this stage, many people are greeting the project with a certain amount of skepticism and there are obvious reasons for this. A spokesman at Viacom recently said, "YouTube and Google have been promising filtering tools for many, many months, while the damage to copyright owners continues" - but many people believe that it will never be able to totally eliminate media piracy. Underground software producers known as "crackers" now take pride in never taking more than 24 hours after release to crack any form of copyright protection or digital rights management, even allegedy unbreakable ones. Google, however, are a bit smarter than the average bear - so as always, we'll have to wait and see.

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