Archive for the ‘Universal Music Group’ tag
YouTube Content ID Tool Capable of Muting Video Sound
- YouTube now mutes recognized copyrighted songs in user’s videos.
As the court cases against YouTube and similar services, they are testing the employment of various strategies to keep them out of hot water. One such tool, YouTube’s Content ID Tool, is capable of identifying music in the audio stream of a video and muting it. This link to YouTube, YouTube: Joni Mitchell - Summertime (1998) !STEREO OPTION!, clearly demonstrates their ability to remove the sound from a video. In this particular case, the user, MYoutcastOR, clearly was infringing the song “Summertime” by Herbie Hancock, Stevie Wonder and Joni Mitchell that is featured on the album Gershwin’s World, which is a Polygram Records record. Ploygram Records is owned by Universal Music Group, who is currently battling tube site Veoh.
This has several intended and unintended effects. On the upside, it allows youtube to leave creative works that might have um, “borrowed” some tunes to help them make their point in arguably viewable and working order. Whatever visual and textual messages were contained in the video are not lost. However, on the negative side this filter cannot determine when the occurance of such music would fall under the terms of fair use, and other exceptions to the copyright doctrines. And finally, for the users it results in un-removed YouTube dead pages like the one meationed in this article, which frustrates users, and hurts user exerpience.
Veoh, Safe Harbor, and Encoding
An intersting argument had been put forth in the case of Veoh vs Universal Music Group. Universal alledges that Veoh could not invoke the protections afforded to hosts under “Safe Harbor” because the video providor encoded the files from the original format to a web-friendly FLV format, thus enabling the infringer. As Xbiz reports, XBiz: U.S. Judge Rules for Veoh in Infringement Case, the judge ruled that this did not eliminate safe harbor provisions:
Veoh claimed in its response that UMG had failed to provide “any information about the alleged infringement that would allow Veoh to adequately assess UMG’s threats,” but UMG countered the argument, claiming that Veoh did not qualify for safe harbor provisions on the grounds that some functions of Veoh’s software, including those that create copies and deliver videos to users, were ineligible for protection.
U.S. District Judge A. Howard Matz rejected this argument and ruled in Veoh’s favor because “Veoh, he found, had no ability to prescreen content, and there was no evidence that Veoh fostered infringement for profit,” according to DRM Watch, a website that publishes analyses of all things DRM.