Can YouTube Evict Led Zeppelin?
YouTube’s technology for finding videos posted without the copyright holder’s permission may be useless to identify footage posted to the site from Led Zeppelin’s reunion concert on Monday. The company recently implemented digital fingerprinting technology to identify videos that the company has been asked by the copyright owner not to post on the site. The technology compares posted clips with reference videos supplied to YouTube for analysis. It relies on identifying consistent qualities in a video, said Struan Robertson, senior associate with Pinsent Masons and editor of the legal Web site Out-law.com. But the technology doesn’t work as well with batches of different clips with different characteristics, even if the clips are all from the same event. “That’s more difficult when you are dealing with a live performance because the sound quality is poor and the image quality is similarly poor and probably very varied according to who was filming and where they were in the crowd,” Rober
