While I wait for youtube to process a 4 mb video I just uploaded (I've been waiting for about 3 hours, by the way), I'll go ahead and talk about youtube's new way to fight copyright infringement.
Copyright infringement in youtube has always been a problem, to copyright owners anyway. It's very easy to just post up a show, movie, or a song and gain at least ten thousand hits. Now, youtube has a new way to counter copyright infringement of music. They will analyze the audio in any video and if they find any audio that belongs to a copyrighted song, they will MUTE (yes, MUTE) the audio completely. I'm not really sure how they do this, but I think they check the audio against a huge database of copyrighted music, and if any audio from the video matches anything from the database, they will mute it. As you can imagine, this might take a lot of time, because there are terabytes of music out there, which why I'm guessing that they're taking so fucking long to upload and process my 4 megabyte, 50 second video!!! Muting audio on youtube might curb copyright infringement on music a bit. I don't know if they're doing this only for newly uploaded videos or if they will run audio checks against already existing videos. If they do mute the older videos, they will effectively be purging at least half of all youtube. Anything that has non-original music will be muted, and that includes short movies, video logs, anime music videos, and much more. Is this really a smart thing for youtube to do? The copyright holders might temporarily satisfied, but is it worth decimating the youtube community?
Inevitably a subculture of smugglers will smuggle all that music on there someway. 'til then they'll have to do battle with the likes of Al Yen fart noises and such.
ReplyDeleteLet's see them try to mute THAT.