The state of our video ID tools
Posted by Steve Chen, YouTube
co-founder
Recent speculation and stories like this
or this
Reuters report on YouTube's use of video identification
tools made us think it would be useful to clarify what we’re doing.
We’ve been developing improved content identification for months,
and we’re confident that in the not-too-distant future, we’ll
unveil an innovative solution that will work for users and content
creators alike. This is one of the most technologically complicated
tasks that we have ever undertaken. But YouTube has always been
committed to developing sustainable and scalable tools that work
for all content owners.
Even though we haven’t given too many details, we’ve been hard at
work. Earlier this year we implemented audio fingerprinting
technology from Audible Magic, to help identify the
content of music partners like Warner Music, Sony BMG, and
Universal. Today we're experimenting with video identification
tools, and will share with you a few core principles driving our
technology development, past and present.
We are beginning tests on an automated system to identify and match
specific videos. The technology extracts key visual aspects of
uploaded videos and compares that information against reference
material provided by copyright holders. Achieving the accuracy to
drive automated policy decisions is difficult, and requires a
highly tuned system. Once accuracy is achieved, the challenge
becomes speed and scale to support the millions of people who use
YouTube every day. We are working with some of the major media
companies to test what we have developed. We’re excited about the
progress so far, and we’re dedicated to making these tests
successful, but as always with cutting-edge technologies, there’s
no guarantee of success.
Now, when it comes to spotting pornography and graphic violence,
and other content prohibited by our
beats our community flagging. Once a user flags a video, we
immediately review it and remove it if we find a violation. But our
community can’t identify infringing content. We all know
pornography and violence when we see them. But
can only be determined by the copyright holder. That is because
almost anyone who creates an original video has the copyright for
that work, and such a wide range of copyright holders'
preferences vary widely.
Some copyright holders want control over every use of their
creation. Many professional artists and media companies post their
latest videos without telling us, while some home video-makers
don't want their stuff online. Some legal departments take down
a video one day and the marketing department puts it up the next.
Which is their right, but our community can’t predict those things,
and neither can we. The same is true for technology. No matter how
good our video identification technology gets, it will never be
able to read copyright-holders’ minds.
If a content owner identifies material that she doesn’t want on
YouTube, she can request its removal with the click of a mouse. If
particular users repeatedly infringe copyrights, we terminate their
accounts. We have long made a practice of creating a unique
"hash" of every video removed for alleged copyright
infringement and blocking re-uploads of the hash. We
on what is and isn’t permissible under the law. Our upcoming video
identification system will be our latest way of empowering
copyright holders, going above and beyond legal requirements.
We’ll continue our focus on delivering a great user experience.
YouTube's no-fuss upload lets video artists collapse the gap
between the creative moment and its worldwide publication. It helps
our hundreds of media partners - as well as marketers and
advertisers - spread their hottest work while it's still hot.
And it enables presidential candidates participating in our
YouChoose 2008 program to engage in a direct, open dialogue with
voters, bringing transparency, access and authenticity to the
political process. We’re carefully designing our new identification
technologies to not impede those free and fast forms of
expression.
In conclusion, a content management system has to have technology
that provides high quality matching and detection, but it also has
to apply business rules in ways that support the business
objectives of partners while providing high quality user
experiences. With the introduction of our video identification
tools, YouTube will continue to be the leader in online video, and
the premier destination for watching and sharing original videos
worldwide. Now, back to
Update: Added direct link
to Wall Street Journal story.
Tags: , Chen, co, founderRecent, Posted, speculation, Steve, Youtube
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