Web Scanning Technology for Copyright Violations 54
eldavojohn writes "I've heard a lot of talk about software being used to detect pirated media anywhere on the web, but haven't seen a lot of details. PhysOrg has a good article on one of the tools out there. Automatic Copyright Infringement Detection (ACID) boasts a patented technology dubbed 'meaning-based computing' that is reportedly capable of finding relationships among 1,000 different types of files. The important thing is that this is not tagging-based searching. 'Autonomy's search technology uses automatic hyperlinking and link clustering that the company claims isn't built into keyword search engines. According to the company, this technology allows computers to perform searches with greater context, so it finds a wider range of related documents or research citations than is possible from keyword searches.' For more details on how this magic works, check out Autonomy's patent and the many patents by its subdivision, Virage."
Encryption? (Score:2)
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It really seems to be targeting your typical TV episode uploaded to YouTube...
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Or take a large file and break it into smaller files. Or reverse the file... or
It doesn't (Score:5, Informative)
However it may well do what it is designed to do, finding copyright infringement on the web. Autonomy [wikipedia.org] are a serious company working on pattern recognition, not some fly-by-night cowboys. This copyright-finding thing would just be a side application of their core technology.
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Serious companies don't patent software? (Score:2)
Interesting tidbit though - this Autonomy patent is a US one, they wouldn't get a patent on this in their own home country of the UK, where software patents are (currently) not allowed.
Thank God for Darknets... (Score:4, Insightful)
More importantly, it looks like it can't do anything unless the target is somewhere on the Web and is reasonably active. The darknets and private trackers are still safe.
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Please note I am against software patents in general although I am not against closed source or
Re:Thank God for Darknets... (Score:4, Interesting)
I am surprised they survived the internet bubble (or lack of)
Like a patent means anything (Score:3, Insightful)
If I looked at patents to determine what a business was capable of, I would be driving a car that gets 100's of miles to the gallon!
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AI (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't think this sort of searching for pirated content is going to be terribly effective, though. I mean, it might be able to catch the blatant stuff like youtube, but ultimately, they're never going to kill p2p, especially once private trackers become more common.
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And you wonder why eventually all these bots get fed up and try to wipe out the human race?
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Of course, they might start selling porn to each other. That's when we'd be really screwed. Imagine spending half your time as image-recognition hardware, and the other half making crappy porn movies.
Yeah, sounds like a pretty dark future to me.
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Surely even bots aren't dumb enough to PAY for porn
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Fully buzzword compliant (Score:5, Informative)
All those buzzwords. Apparently somebody has a system that can characterize and match images and video. That's reasonable enough, it's been done before, and the question is how good the new one is. The article gives zero help in that direction.
From the same source: "Nanogenerator provides continuous power by harvesting energy from the environment". It's a variation on the piezoelectric generator concept, like a piezo fire starter.
IP Freely? (Score:1)
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Surely, if he lives up to his name and believes in the freedom of IP, he wouldn't enforce his copyright?
Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
As far as I can tell, the article starts off by saying that they have a wonderful system to inspect and compare the video content of a clip against a HUGE database (eg. tens of thousands of hours of copyrighted movies, TV series, music). And, that they know how to read _any_ media format (eg. an AVI using some particular codec embedded into a Word document which is zipped....) The suggestion is that the software could "read" a Youtube video clip, and recognize that it contains a few minutes of a Jay Leno monologue. Needless to say, they don't explain how they might possibly do this - because, as far as I can tell, they can't. Not even close.
If you look at the patents, they're pretty much all about text or metadata searching. For example, they seem to have found an innovative way to find keywords to categorize a document....by scanning for words in the document! Or of categorizing a video file...by looking at metadata (eg. comments) embedded in the file. The only amazing thing about these algorithms is that some dimbulb in the patent office decided to give them a 20 year monopoly on something people have been doing for decades.
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If it was truly an innovation or AI, it would scan the video/audio clips and recognize Jay Lenno's voice and have that trigger a flag for infringement. Unfortunately I don't think that they have managed to catalog a database of copyrighted works based on such things.
With any luck at all, the **AA will spend billions on this patented claptrap only to find out 2 years from now that there is no way to make it work without landing themselves in even deeper
Standard Machine Learning... (Score:5, Informative)
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1,2: This is the standard TFIDF method. TF means 'text frequency', you give each word a weight equal to its frequency in the document. IDF means 'inverse document frequency', if a word is rare, you give it more weight. Typically this is done with the logarithm, btw.
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4,5,6: This is extremely general. But it sounds like any of a myriad of methods to generate 'higher-order-features'. For example, by using a nonlinear kernel function.
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7&9: Sounds like a way to measure the importance of a feature. Many such methods are already in use, for example, mutual information (MI).
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8: In other words, a 'stoplist'. Nice way to make it sound really complicated and useful, though.
Skimming the rest of the patent, I don't see much substance. But I admit I didn't go through all of it. Perhaps someone else will have more patience.Re: (Score:2)
Hold on, my company has a patent on this (Score:2, Funny)
It's a hopeless pursuit (Score:4, Insightful)
Sorry, but we've hit a new age of abundance. With the overwhelming percentage of internet users using LimeWire, BitTorrent etc, attempts to sustain a manufactured scarcity in the face of this abundance will similarly fade away into obsolescence.
The copyright enforcement versus piracy arms race will make for interesting history courses in future decades. I can see the courses now - "The Rise And Fall Of Intellectual Property".
I'm looking forward to blowing my grandkids' minds when I tell them about the era when information wasn't free.
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that there is a shortage of good new ideas so they must conserve and constrain the ideas that exist. They fear abundance
becuase their profits depend on an absence of it. The more bullish optimists in the world laugh at IP because they know nothing
is new under the sun, that there will always be brilliant thinkers changing the world with astonishing new ideas,
regardless of whether they are paid by a
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Hey, at least it's patented! (Score:1)
No better than a dowsing rod (Score:3, Insightful)
Until I see some sort of evidence that they can do it, I rank the claims along with those who claim that they can tell what people are thinking by where they scratch.
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Automatic Copyright Infringement Detection (ACID) boasts a patented technology
ACID best decribes what these people are on when they go out doing this kind of crap. It's technically unfeasable. We've seen that all they really do is keyword search in filenames, even though several groups have claimed to do more. Name the files differently and for the most part you'll fly under the radar.
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Won't work (Score:1)
Re:Won't work (Score:5, Informative)
However, in a corporate intranet environment, this could be VERY useful for 'knowledge workers' like those working in R&D departments. I've managed an Autonomy system for a large multinational and they were using it for search on their internet and intranet sites. The average internet John Doe was complaining like hell, while the employees in R&D and similar functions were loving it.
In this case, using it for detecting copyright infringement could actually work, since the pattern-recognition abilities of Autonomy are in fact very good.
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What is mine, isn't yours. (Score:2)
Finding reverse plagiarism (Score:4, Interesting)
"Meaninig-based computing" (Score:3, Insightful)
I have a program that detects plagairism (Score:1, Funny)
-mcgrew
robots.txt? (Score:2)
Let me see if I get it... (Score:2)
Autonomy (Score:1)
they didn't like very much:
Life in the Autonomy sweatshop
Or:
Stress Is More Fun
Following a successful interview at Autonomy Headquarters in Cambridge
on March 24th, I was offered employment and agreed to start work on
May 22nd. Despite this being a huge upheaval involving a large outlay
of money (since no relocation fee was offered), I decided to make the
move from Woking to the Cambridge area.
At first, every
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Should your former employer ever attempt to persuade you to remove the article again, PM me and I'll host it for you.
Jon