Can video fingerprinting and watermarking technology stop copyright violators?
What's needed, say researchers in digital rights management, are ways to automatically screen out pirated videos before they're uploaded, and to track down people who make pirate copies.
And, as it turns out, such technology is nearing the point of widespread adoption. One video-sharing site, Guba, has already begun to filter out copyrighted videos using a home-grown system dubbed "Johnny." The system reduces a video file to a mathematical representation and then excludes it from the site if its "fingerprint" matches one in a database of commercial videos.
Media-technology companies such as Philips and Thomson are also working on ways to thwart video pirates. Thomson has introduced a system that embeds invisible "watermarks" in movies, allowing studios to trace online copies of movies recorded by camcorder users to the specific theater and movie showing where they were pirated.
Read the article @ technology review.
