Masters of Photography

Check out this film school project that was legally put together with permission by the copyright holders. It goes from old to new while set against a great song. It's funny to see how all the younger generations photos stuck to color while the older ones were all black and white. While I am a big fan of color, none of the younger generations gave a shout out to their mentors which I thought we might see. Great slide show and be on the lookout for more.

Thank you Sir. May I have another?

These copyright infringement suits that are nipping at Youtube's feet keep popping up and this time Apple may get dragged into the fight. As many of you may know, Apple's iPhone will carry YouTube videos, which funny enough were selected by YouTube and made available for iPhone users to view on their devices.

How well thought out was the selection of videos that were made available to the iPhone? Turns out that a small number of the 10,000 videos made available were illegally uploaded by someone other than the copyright holder and now threatens to put Apple in the same legal hot water as YouTube. Examples include a clip of Thierry Henry, a French football player, clips from Adult Swim, the comedy channel operated by Turner Broadcasting and clips of OJ Simpson's getaway Bronco chase.

While Apple probably never thought it would be trafficking in bootlegged content with the likes of YouTube, it now has to worry that the content being displayed on it's devices don't infringe on other's copyright.

So who is liable? What has the Internet done to issues in copyright? And more importantly who is going to have to pay out the money to settle this infringements?

I'm highly skeptical that Apple will be found liable but its an embarrassing mess that they are going to have to deal with in the future.

Copyright Pirates on the Internet High Seas!

Is Google promoting piracy? What do they need to do, if anything, to combat it? What is Youtube really doing to combat it? Is piracy all of a sudden going mainstream? This is a major issue for Cutcaster and our members or future members. In this blog, we reported on this before when Youtube announced it was going to use AudibleMagic to begin detecting copyrighted content on their site and track the content to pay royalties to the actual owners of it. Personally i thought the response was a very late one and pretty weak to the $1 billion dollar lawsuit it was slapped with by Viacom. Not the kind of lawsuit you want to wake up to but in the end it looked like Viacom's bark was bigger than the bite.

But a report was put out today by The National Legal and Policy Center that suggested that Google was voluntarily neglecting to take down pirated content because they wanted the traffic and profit more than doing the right thing. The stated goal of the NLPC is "to do our best to expose the pirating of copyrighted material by finding and posting as many apparently pirated works as possible. For starters, we are focusing on Google Video because it hosts many full-length movies and concerts and because it has received less attention than YouTube, also owned by Google." The NLPC is definitely not afraid to go after the big dogs.

In Google's defense, one shouldn't be able to bring a lawsuit or sue someone for indexing content. It's impractical for Google to manage what is legal or not and frankly that is not what Googles role should be. Companies need to pursue the pirates themselves, if anyone. But Google needs to do more and take the lead in this issue or it will come back to bite them. They have working relationships with most of the media companies and they should partner with them to at least give the appearance that they care about the issue and want to help, even if they prefer to be relaxed about the issue for profit motives.

Cutcaster will work with sellers to track down any illegal uses of content creators work. It's a major fear of people who put content online that it won't be protected and others will use it in ways that is either unknown to the copyright holder or illegally. As the article points out, copyright infringement around the globe hurts everyone and new provisions and rules need to be put into place. It cost the movie industry an estimated $2.3 billion in revenues according to this study by Carl Horowitz of the NLPC.
God only knows what it did to other smaller individuals or companies outside the movie industry who have content online and have been trying to protect their work from Internet pirates.

So what are the best ways to protect someones content while it is on the Internet? Are normal people like us, outside of the big movie studios, very concerned about their content being pirated? I, for sure, know a few who are.

Click here to view the NLPC report and the 50 most pirated films on Google.

Youtube will begin testing Copyright Screening Technology

In a move long overdue, YouTube will begin to test it's new technology to identify copyrighted video that is uploaded to the site. According to Reuters, the technology scan is a "video fingerprinting tool" that will look for attributes in the video clips that it will be able to determine if the clip is copyrighted. I'm still not sure how well this will work or how they are going to get the "fingerprints" of the content beforehand on record.

I think for larger copyright holders this will be a good move for both them and YouTube. YouTube will give the holder the option to remove the clip or leave it up on the site and join a revenue sharing deal with YT. I'm not sure if this will be done for all users of YouTube or just for their bigger clients i.e. CBS, NBC. In addition, it looks like YouTube abandoned plans to do a deal with Audible Magic to provide this technology. In the end, I think that some of YouTube's traffic could be affected by this. There are a number of sites out there that still take a relaxed approach to copyrighted content being uploaded to its site.

Cutcaster is working on a logical way to detect whether content that is uploaded to the site is copyrighted and thus not able to be licensed. This is a big problem when trying to create an open marketplace where the participants feel that they are secure and can use the content they legally purchased without the fear that it will come back later to bite them in the butt. I'll be very excited to hear what people think of our solution when they see it after the launch. If you have any questions beforehand, please email me.

How long to locate film rights?

Thought I would post this classic Fountainhead scene. I'm going to do an experiment to see how difficult it is to locate the license for this clip and get the cost so I could post it legally on the blog. I have a good idea what it will cost but not sure how long it will take. Let me know what you think it will cost, how long and then what you think about Howard Roark. I've asked Getty and Warner Brothers to see who could license the rights and how much it costs to license just this scene for my blog. Until I can post this the legal way, I'll let Youtube catch the heat for me.

This should give you a little background on the scene, courtesy of wikipedia, one of my favorite sites. Post your guesses.

So Why Exactly Is Monetizing Video So Difficult?

Video search, detection and the tracking of associated royalties is a major dilemma for many video Web sites. The problem goes back to the (inevitable) question of monetizing video content and product while trying to walk a tricky tightrope, hoping during every interaction that one is able to track and pay the correct amount of royalties to the right person for the material at hand. Cutcaster is dedicated to solving this problem and has been working hard to find the easiest solutions for both sellers and buyers, ensuring that everyone is happy and protected at the end of the day. Below are some of the major headaches associated with searching and blocking copyrighted videos online -

1) Content that is removed from one site quickly migrates to other competing sites or, as is often the case, re-posted by a different user on the same site. Thus, it reaches a further audience and builds an even greater following, a cyber-nerd phenomenon known as the long tail effect. Action has to be taken to make sure sites can't use the DMCA as a shield while they attract a large audience and reap the benefits of someone else's content. The content producer must be paid and protected.

2) Video data is extremely complex to analyze. Massive quantities of information need to be recorded in a secure database for a valid digital fingerprint to be catalogued.

3) If a user crops or modifies the video, even slightly through different means of superimposing and other tricks, many copyrighting detection systems can be fooled into not recognizing the problem.

4) Content creators with their own content must register it with Audible Magic, Gracenote’s, or some other future service so that it can be recorded in one of the databases mentioned above. In most cases, this process is quite expensive and time consuming for the user. The technology is slowly catching up, but it still presents a logistical problem for both the site and user.

These are all challenges that Cutcaster must tackle in order to be able to offer and license content to its group of buyers. We have been logging many hours researching and developing ways to detect this type of illegally uploaded material to our site, and we pledge to continue doing so.