Detecting pirated video content is essential for a new digital content era. Many types of websites offer users the ability to upload video content. Websites like YouTube exist solely for this reason, but many social networking sites also allow this capability. Such sites' immense popularity has attracted the ire of content producers who are getting serious about protecting their copyrights and putting real pressure on the owners of these types of sites to eliminate illegal infringement. A large amount of copyright-protected material – from clips from movies and TV shows to music and music videos – is readily available for download by visitors to these types of online video hosting services. While the site operators claim that they are operating under the Fair Use doctrine, content producers and large media companies aren't buying it. They have deep pockets and armies of lawyers at their disposal and are gearing up to take legal action. To avoid costly, protracted legal battles, online video upload sites pursue technologically-based methods of reducing and preventing copyright infringement on their sites.
Preventing inadvertent liability for copyright infringement is a significant issue for any site that permits user-uploaded content. Copyright violations can result in costly and time-consuming legal action and could result in large civil or criminal liability. Our Video Fingerprinting SDK technology provides a perfect solution for these types of sites to continue providing video uploading and hosting of user content while minimizing the risks of copyright infringement. Our state-of-the-art video fingerprinting technology incorporates the latest advances in scene analysis, object tracking, and motion estimation to analyze the content of any video to identify its unique characteristics, such as colors, scene structure, and the motion of objects, to a compact digital descriptor, the video fingerprint. A database of these video fingerprints can be created for copyrighted material. They can then be checked against video materials being uploaded by site users to detect the presence of copyrighted materials and disallow the posting of such materials to their websites.
Unlike products that attempt to provide a similar capability, our technology allows these fingerprints to be identified despite changes in resolution, bitrate, method of encoding, or file format. The video can even be detected when it is included inside another video or when just a fragment of the video is reproduced. These video fingerprints can then be stored, copied, and compared. So, no matter how a user might try to edit or manipulate the video to attempt to circumvent the system, the copyrighted material will be detected and disallowed. This is a significant advantage over competing technologies and uses our video fingerprinting and media monitoring technology as the best choice for copyright infringement detection for owners of sites that wish to host user video content. No other product on the market today can provide this level of protection.
