The Saitz has an interesting post about how a tribute video to his deceased dog Cookie got picked up in the YouTube copyright dragnet and how he dodged doing hard time in the hoosegow.
He does it better than I could so leap on over then roll on back for my two cents.
I guess I knew that they were doing some form of copyright violation trolling over there, but it never occurred to me what that might mean. It has to be automated right, they can't possibly have offshore low wage workers watching YouTube videos that can identify what pop song has been stolen.
I remember that Verizon launched a music recognition service on their phones using software Song IDentity by Rocket Mobile. You remember the cheese ball commercials where a chick is walking by a store blaring music out the front, holds up her phone for 10 seconds (I think they shortened the time for the commercial - I mean 10 seconds in a commercial of someone doing one thing, no way). Her phone recognizes the song, she downloads it to her phone (who thought that service would be a good idea? - maybe I'm just in the wrong demographic) presses play and walks away the song magically picking up where it left off from the store.
This stuff is all circa 2006. Actually, there is a CNET article about same (YouTube, your copyright and Google, by Harry Fuller; October 2006) that is somewhat interesting about how they were looking to automate this (sure I could find an article that is more recent, but isn't it interesting what they were planning to do and where they are now). What I find fascinating is the database and processing power you'd need to scrub all the incoming videos to YouTube.
More to the point, let's say I post a video today with a song by my favorite artist Raffi which is not in the You-Can't-Use-My-Work database when I upload it. Then two months later Raffi gets wise and adds his stuff to the You-Can't-Use-My-Work database. Does YouTube continually re-scan the massive library of videos looking for new violations as their database grows. I'm guessing they must. Well, I'm going to a talk on MapReduce next week - maybe I'll find some answers there.
Thanks for the inspiration Ben.