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The search engine has made significant progress in recent weeks signing content partnership deals for YouTube. But a growing number of studio executives, irritated by no-shows at meetings and canceled test programs, say they are frustrated with Google's inability to scrub the site of copyright-infringing material.
While CEO Eric Schmidt made big news in Las Vegas two months ago when he said the company was very "close to turning on" a system that will streamline the takedown process, when that system actually will be deployed is a mystery.
Adding to the agitation, copyright-filtering technology is already in use at smaller video sites such as Guba, Dailymotion.com and Eyespot. Even Microsoft has installed the features for which Hollywood is clambering on its Soapbox site.
So why not YouTube? Increasingly, media executives are wondering whether the video-sharing giant is doing its best to come up with copyright-protection technology or playing a game of chicken in which billions in sales and perhaps the future of copyright law is at stake.
"Clearly, this is not a resource constraint. This is a function of will," charged Darcy Antonellis, senior vice president of worldwide anti-piracy operations for Warner Bros. "We are making very clear (to YouTube) what has to be done...and it has got to move along at a much faster pace."
Copyright owners are starting to show they mean business. Last week, two French sports groups joined a British soccer league in a class action lawsuit against Google. Already hanging over the search engine's head is Viacom's $1 billion copyright complaint filed in March.
Copyright infringement at YouTube and Google Video has also attracted scrutiny from the National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC), a private watchdog group that advocates for ethical conduct in the public arena and is known for exposing corruption.
NLPC Chairman Ken Boehm said that in just a couple of weeks he has found more than 125 full-length movies, TV shows and live music performances on Google Video. He strongly doubts Google when it says it can't block infringing content.
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Now showing The National Legal and Policy Center surveyed Google Video in recent weeks and found more than 120 copyrighted movies, TV shows and music videos available for viewing. Below are some of those titles. |
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| Title | Months up | Viewings* |
| The Core | 1 | 147,079 |
| Enron | 1 | 3,555 |
| Fahrenheit 911 | 4 | 586,788 |
| Miami Vice (French dub) | 6 | 650 |
| The Office, Season 2, The Fire | 1 | 3,069 |
| Pan's Labyrinth | 1 | 2,125 |
| Pirates of Silicon Valley | 7 | 10,419 |
| Spider-Man | 7 | 12,114 |
| The Wire, Season 4, Episode 9 | 4 | 26,095 |
| United Flight 93 (French dub) | 6 | 10,047 |
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*Does not represent unique visitors. As of midday Tuesday, the above titles were still up.
Source: NLPC |
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"If a 58-year-old former prosecutor can find this stuff, Google should be able to," Boehm said. "I'm nobody's idea of a computer expert. These folks are bleeding edge in terms of information. They should be ahead of the curve. This undermines the credibility of their technology...We think there isn't good faith in their representations that they are doing all they can."
YouTube makes deals--lots of them. Major media powers, such as CBS, NBC and Warner Bros. have agreements to post promotional clips on the site.
Last week, YouTube announced a licensing agreement with Hearst-Argyle Television. YouTube agreed to pay for news weather and entertainment videos from the company's member stations.
Recently, YouTube announced a partnership with EMI Records that allows it to host videos and music from EMI artists.
YouTube said in a statement that the company expects to "continue to take the lead" in providing state-of-the-art tools that help content creators find violations of their copyright.
"Most content owners understand that we respect copyrights," Catherine Lacavera, one of Google's attorneys, said in a statement. "We work every day to help them manage their content...These lawsuits simply misunderstand the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which balances the rights of copyright holders against the need to protect Internet communications and content."
Google has said that once YouTube's new system launches, it will speed the process of notifying copyright owners of violations.
In interviews with CNET News.com, executives from five entertainment companies said they began questioning YouTube's commitment to antipiracy systems a year ago. They say YouTube backed out of a meeting last year among the Motion Picture Association of America and most of the frontrunners in online video, including Guba, Joost, Grouper and MySpace, according to two sources.
See more CNET content tagged:
YouTube,
Google Video,
Hollywood,
antipiracy,
Google Inc.
Oh boo hoo hoo.
So to the RIAA, MPAA, and anyother AA out there. Until you learn to play in the digital world an realize that all this is just like the parent that always says "no" and customer is the kid saying "thats what you think" you, in the end, will be replaced. I just hope artists of both the movie and music ilk will will one day drop these old money hungry SOB's and go with people that really do apprecidate the art in entertainment or come up with their own distrubution systems.
I think they do not know what to do anymore.. they must have
realized by now that any DRM protection can be broken...
"Right now, cleaning up pirated content on YouTube is left to copyright owners. Big entertainment conglomerates, with literally thousands of shows, movies or music videos must hunt for unauthorized copies themselves." awwww, i'm cryin' 4 hollywood . mebbe they shd ask Steve Jobs how to use a computer - I hear he's got a gig down there now with that wiley Disney outfit. Oh yeah - isn't he on Google's Board as well?? lol
See ya, Hollywood. You were fun in the 20th century. Too bad you didn't make it to the 21st.
Instead, the users who watch the video have the ability to flag the video as inappropriate. After a video has been flagged, all future watchers are warned and eventually an admin for youtube will check out the video.
A flag button for copyrighted works probably wouldn't work for two reasons.
1) The vast majority of everything on youtube is a copyright violation (e.g., someone talking into their web cam playing copyrighted music in the background).
2) Porn is easy to detect but who really knows if a song from 1940 is still under copyright or not and if it was ever even copyrighted?
Google should just put what they have up now and improve it gradually. I predict though, youtube will lose its popularity if its filtering works well. Youtube became popular for the same reason Napster did and after Napster cleaned up its act, look how well it is doing. The huge traffic numbers will be diverted to another site that doesn?t filter. If Google has taught us one thing, it is never count on a market as being completely filled (who would have ever though a small search engine like Google could overtake Altavista and Yahoo?).
Also, Google is really stretching when they say the DMCA protects them. I would agree the DMCA protects Youtube if Youtube wasn?t directly making money from the showing of the copyrighted works (ad revenue). For example, if someone paid Youtube $5 a month to upload videos and there were no ads on the site then Youtube would be nothing more than a web host provider and the DMCA would protect it.
The provision in the DMCA Google is referencing was intended to protect web hosts from users who unknowingly uploaded illegal content. But it Google?s case, if it wasn?t for the illegal content it wouldn?t have its large user base and wouldn?t make any advertising revenue. The DMCA would probably also apply to Youtubes business model if the vast majority of videos on the site weren?t illegal. Lets say only 5% of the videos are copyright violations on Youtube, then Google could probably claim ignorance and state they don?t make their money (ad revenue) through the showing of copyrighted works.
hollywood. I don't understand it. you resent their wealth and
hypocracy? Take a look at Silicon Valley, how VCs are taking
subsidy and tax breaks (corporate welfare) to enrich themselves
in the name of alternative energy. How Google is taking the
money invested in the IPO by pension funds, endowments, and
hard working people and giving it to their relatives and cronies
and buying companies owned by the VCs on the board. Look at
the level of donations to regional charities in the bay area and
compare them to the level of donations regional charities in
southen california get. It starts to become pretty clear that the
self righteous and self serving are in Silicon Valley, not LA. Why
this love affair with one bunch of jerks up north over some less
jerky people down south?
Google is simply refusing to give into that, which is something that we, as an audience and/or market should have done ages ago. This is why Google is beloved by the consumer base, and the big entertainment conglomerates are not. Almost like a "Les Miserables" for the 21st century...
Anyhow its not against Hollywod or its average cinema. Most people love Hollywood consumer oriented junk and will eat it happily and pay money to go and see it.
Dont confuse the Hollywod Industry with Hollywod Actors and Directors.
This is about a bunch of thugs trying to position themselves as kings of media in the internet. They are not loosing money over this one, they are simple not making more money. Its about greed and not about art.
The real battle here is whether the content providers must do it themselves, in order to protect their own copyrights, or whether they can just dump that off on some arbitrary presenter, like YouTube or MySpace. IMHO, how is YouTube or MySpace supposed to know all the terms and conditions of another companies copyrights?
Google is just trying to protect its audience from being bullied with oppressive terms by mass-market content providers in a top-down structure like the way broadcast or cable TV provides for.
Be that as it may, if you look at the #s that are supposedly how many times someone watched whatever video on Google or YouTube, it's minute in comparison to how many have gone to the movies to see it. It will probably cost more to prevent the 1% imagined loss (is it really a loss if the persons viewing the video wouldn't have gone to the cinema to see it even if they could have?) than it will be to police it.
As for free to air shows, those shouldn't even be in their complaints list. The reasoning of 'but the advertisers aren't getting their air time!' is ludicrous. How many of you are going to forget what a FORD is? Or Burger King?
I'm going to boycott businesses that simply are looking to Google for financial relief and failure to secure their own content.
The users of these services are the offenders, let's focus on the problem of user behavior and more importantly this forum has given those companies more exposure for FREE outside traditional marketing channels.
I say - Google, send them a bill for advertising and marketing. Most companies would long to have exposure of a viral marketing of a product or service.
I can easily post a video containing copyrighted material, however, I can name it whatever else I wanted to and just tell my friends about it until it came down.
Filtering is a complete joke - it hardly ever works and always ends up taking some kind of innocent casualty along with it in higher numbers than intended.
Execs line of thinking is, "if it's there, why can't you filter it?" It's not that easy and I wouldn't blame YouTube or any other video warehouse one bit if they didn't lift a finger to roll it out.
Copyright holders are the ones that need to protect their content, therefore, they should be the ones exerting the energy into searching all the content on these services. These legit services provide ample warning to the user not to upload copyrighted material. That should be the extent of their enforcement until asked to remove content.
This reminds me of the patent holder needing to defend his patent against infringement or else lose the patent.
I guess Hollywood is just that lazy.
As one other reader mentioned, Google is probably trying to do it right. Filtering copyrighted video content is not easy, and I doubt that all of those smaller companies and sites have done it as well as they claim to (press releases are a lot less expensive and easier to write than software).
What google should do is develop a simple program that searches the youtube site for a list of titles that are stored in a database. They can give this application free of charge to any content owner who is worried about copyright infringement, and the owners can manage the content themselves, by running the scrubbing app on their server, which will automatically report any copyright infringement to youtube. All the studios would have to do then is keep their database current.