Google, the proud new owner of YouTube, reportedly has employed Los Gatos-based company Audible Magic to filter their video content for copyrighted material as complaints about piracy on the video-sharing site have grown exponentially simultaneous to its popularity.
Audible Magic technology was cited in the U.S. Supreme Court's Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios v. Grokster ruling as a service to keep pirates off their networks. Neither Google nor Audible Magic have officially announced the filtering of YouTube content but the joint venture is inevitable. Audible Magic creates an audio "fingerprint" on videos. Since 1999, their database has primarily consisted of radio broadcasts but they are working to expand it with television shows and movies.
Last month, Viacom demanded that Google remove over 100,000 videos from the website, including the rampantly popular Comedy Central clips from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report, as well as children's show Spongebob Squarepants. NBC Universal and NewsCorp have also recently requested the removal of their copyrighted video clips from YouTube. While there is no hard data on the effect of the removal of Viacom video clips from YouTube, it is almost certain that the video-sharing site will lose a significant amount of its audience. Sites like Dailymotion.com in France and Peekvids.com in Denmark are just two examples of video-sharing sites that screen full-length films and television episodes that the fed-up Googled YouTube audience will flock to if all this great content is filtered out.
MySpace, what I considered to be the only true democratic networking and content site on the internet and the site with the greatest life-expectancy, has also announced a plan to use Audible Magic to prevent copyrighted videos from being uploaded onto the site.
Have we learned nothing from the effects of peer-to-peer music file sharing? Have we learned nothing from the demise of the record industry? This is what will happen to YouTube and ultimately to Viacom, NewsCorp and NBC Universal if this filtering occurs:
-YouTube will lose its audience to unfiltered sites like Dailymotion.com and Peekvids.com
-Google will never earn back the $1.6 billion it paid for YouTube.
-Television will continue to lose its viewers as they are not able to view clips without being subjected to obtrusive commercials.
File sharing is not the perpetrator in this scenario; it is an innocent bystander. The broadcasting corporations need to learn what the record companies never learned. They must adapt to and embrace technology and their new audience (the new generation), not circumvent and treat them like criminals.
Ackerman, Elise. "Google to start filtering YouTube videos." MercuryNews.com. 22 Feb 2007.
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