Written By Kate Zimmermann | February 23, 2007 | Share This |

Finally pacifying its media critics, YouTube will ditch its intentions to build a copyright-detection filter and instead adopt filtering technology from Audible Magic. Charlene Li has a good post about the benefits of Audible Magic’s software,

“Every significant music distributor (and now film and video, too) sends its content to AM to be logged into the database. So AM’s database is always up to date with millions and millions of files to compare.

AM has (and has continually improved) “fingerprinting” technology that can recognize that content, even if you ripped it at a different bit rate, removed the first ten seconds, or recorded it off a jukebox at a bar.”

Though the terms of the deal have not been released, Eric Schmidt did say that filtering technology would “roll out very soon”.

YouTube announced in September that it would create a filtering technology to recognize copyright videos. A number of content distribution deals were based on that promise, including those with Viacom, Warner Music, and Sony BMG. When YouTube failed to deliver, however, Viacom and others began to abandon ship. Two weeks ago, Viacom demanded 100K clips off of YouTube, while this week a CBS deal fell through and NBC sent out another round of angry letters.

Perhaps taking a hint from Myspace, YouTube has evidently decided that some thing are easier to outsource.

Worth the Read