How Copyright Holders Profit from Infringement on YouTube

Wired.com reports: By now, we’re all pretty familiar with how digital music works: People get sued, content gets deleted, and start-ups go bankrupt.

YouTube’s ContentID marks a welcome change from that routine by freeing people to infringe copyright while generally keeping copyright holders happy. In an area known for bitter lawsuits and hastily issued “take down” notices, this is that rarest of birds: a feel-good digital music story. YouTube accomplished this by writing Lawrence Lessig calls “east coast code” (in this case, copyright law) into “west coast code” (computer code). As a result, we can infringe some copyrights on YouTube with full permission.

Ironically, YouTube’s ContentID program was developed to make it faster and easier to delete unapproved content from YouTube. It still does that, but the system’s capacity to monetize infringing videos while allowing them to remain on the site is becoming more significant.

YouTube’s database of audio and video fingerprints is learning how to deal with the fact that the guy who added a saxophone part to a particular song deserves a certain minute percentage of revenue when the song appears in your YouTube video. When you upload a video with someone else’s song as the soundtrack, you infringe on two exclusive rights of the copyright holder: the right to to distribute the work and the right to synchronize it to video. Nobody cares. YouTube’s database pays the saxophonist (and everyone else with a stake in the song) a percentage of ad revenue, depending on the way their contracts worked out. This explains why the JK Wedding Dance video was able to feature Chris Brown’s “Forever” without permission, without being taken down.

That said, you can’t please everyone. Warner Music Group thinks YouTube’s revenue-sharing deal is too paltry and refuses to participate. The label also has a problem with guitar-themed videogames and a longstanding quarrel with YouTube.

But Warner’s in the minority here. Other major (and independent) labels have embraced YouTube’s partner program, so that in many cases, you can put entire copyrighted songs in your videos and upload them to YouTube. Just one caveat: if it becomes a hit — as the folks behind the JK Wedding Video found out — the rightsholders of the music will get paid while you, most likely, will not.

Given the rarity of this sort of rational approach to digital music, we decided to ask YouTube ContentID product manager Dave King (who also built Rhapsody’s content library) and spokesmen Aaron Zamost how the system works.

Every minute, the world uploads roughly 20 hours of video to Google’s YouTube site, according to Zamost. Here’s what happens when it encounters YouTube’s ContentID system.

1. Audio and video tracks are separated, and each plays all the way through to create a spectrogram somewhat similar to what you see when listening to music with a spectral analysis visualizer. The system focuses on the most detailed parts of the file and analyzes the deltas, or changes, in key areas of the spectrogram over time (example to the right).

2. The system runs the resulting spectrogram, or fingerprint, against over one million reference files (and counting) in the ContentID database. The comparison is “fuzzy,” meaning that it doesn’t have to be an exact match — just close enough. This allows audio and video to be identified even if it’s been transcoded into a new format.

3. If the system finds a match, it follows whatever rules are attached in the database. Depending on those, it will either permit the audio and video to be posted only as part of the official video, permit the audio to be posted regardless of what video is attached (as was the case with the JK wedding dance video), or prevent the audio and/or video from appearing on the site.

4. Rules in the database are updated on a rolling basis as labels, publishers, studios, broadcasters and rights societies add new information (example: “the saxophonist just bought all the publishing rights to the song”). That means all of the previously-uploaded stuff on YouTube also has to churn through the Content ID system periodically for each region — a major headache, given that music is licensed locally while the internet is global. “[Dealing with international rights] is a challenge that we’ll be grappling with for years to come, because it’s really, really hard,” said King.

To be clear, other companies have done this sort of fingerprinting (SnoCap, among others), and at least one other company has focused on encoding each song’s copyright situation into a database: RoyaltyShare, which King says could end up providing part of YouTube’s solution. But given YouTube’s massive scope, ContentID is arguably more important than all of those systems combined.

All consumers care about is that the videos we upload to YouTube don’t get deleted, even if they infringe on a music copyright. Thanks to this rare example of cooperation between content owners and distributors, that scenario grows more commonplace every day.