The YouTube copyright police
News: Businessweek has an article today describing the whole notice-and-takedown process at YouTube. Viacom has a cadre of people searching for clips on YouTube that infringes Viacom’s copyrights, spending about $100,000 per month for the process. Viacom doesn’t like it (and that’s why they sued): ” Since November, Viacom says, it has reviewed 2 million clips and sent 200,000 takedown notices to the site, a 10% hit rate.”
YouTube has its own cadre of people, who work 24/7, to take down clips for which a copyright holder sends in a DMCA notice. The unit is called SQUAD, the Safety Quality User Advocacy Department.
Analysis: This is a battle over philosophies (and how the burden to search for infringing works should be allocated): Viacom wants pre-screening on the front-end by YouTube, placing most, if not all, of the burden on YouTube, while YouTube wants an automated process coupled with the DMCA notice-and-takedown process (supplemented by whatever filtering technology that develops)–which places some of the burden on the copyright holder to identify the works in a DMCA notice. What the DMCA requires is what the Viacom lawsuit is all about.
The stats by Viacom are interesting. I’d like to know what the so-called “hit rate” has been after it sent YouTube all the DMCA notices. YouTube says it has “hashing technology” that automatically blocks any copy of a clip that’s already been removed under a DMCA complaint. If that’s true, Viacom’s hit rate could have gone down by now.
