The move is a bid to placate the big copyright
holding music and entertainment industries, which are taking legal
action against social networking and video sharing sites over the
copyright infringing activity of their users.
MySpace, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch's
News Corporation, will use technology from Audible Magic to screen
content which users try to upload. If the audio track matches that
held by the software and is identified as belonging to someone
else, the video will be flagged by the system.
YouTube is the world's biggest video sharing
site, but industry observers estimate that MySpace, with its huge
community of virtual friends, is the second biggest source of
user-submitted videos.
Much of that material is self-made and causes
no copyright problems, but a huge amount is professionally produced
and owned by a major entertainment company.
Those companies will now be able to upload
'fingerprints' of the digital audio of a given video. If a user
submits a video for upload with the same audio, that video will be
blocked.
“For MySpace, video filtering is about
protecting artists and the work they create," said Chris DeWolfe,
co-founder and chief executive of MySpace. "MySpace is dedicated to
ensuring that content owners, whether large or small, can both
promote and protect their content in our community."
Content owners are increasingly calling for
the automation of the process of identifying and removing
infringing material. US entertainment giant Viacom last week
ordered Google-owned YouTube to take down 100,000 clips from
television programmes which it owns. It said that the company was
taking too long to devise a system of identifying and removing its
clips.
The issue is complex in the case of MySpace
because its parent company is the owner of some of the US's biggest
content creators. News Corporation runs Fox News, Fox Television
and movie studio 20th Century Fox. It makes popular series such as
24 and The Simpsons, and has already been involved in copyright
battles as a content owner.
That puts News Corporation in the position of
relying on user-submitted content in one of its businesses but
relying on exploiting copyrighted material in many others.
YouTube has said that it will begin operating
a content identification system and will introduce it in stages. It
has already cut usage deals with many of the major music labels for
use of their content.
