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Comment by ben_w | Hacker News Reader

That’s good info about #1, because it seems to be an O(n * m) problem where n is number of existing copyrighted works and m is the number of uploads.

I’m more concerned about the way copyright itself may need to change to work sensibly with this — according to several UK lawyers I’ve talked to, under UK law any work is copyrighted the moment it is put down in a fixed medium. For example, this comment, the moment it is recorded to any database or cache. It is not a sensible rule as-written, and common law saying “now now, don’t be silly” is the only reason things are not already out of hand. Unfortunately most of the EU isn’t common law and one of the few countries which is is the one which is about to leave. It might be fine, but I can’t tell. I only speak English, mediocre German, and tourist/subtourist French and Greek.

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> For example, this comment, the moment it is recorded to any database or cache. It is not a sensible rule as-written, and common law saying “now now, don’t be silly” is the only reason things are not already out of hand.

It's the same in civil law countries, and the real reason things aren't out of hand is that every site that allows arbitrary users to upload content has some legal boilerplate such as

By uploading any User Content you hereby grant and will grant Y Combinator and its affiliated companies a nonexclusive, worldwide, royalty free, fully paid up, transferable, sublicensable, perpetual, irrevocable license to copy, display, upload, perform, distribute, store, modify and otherwise use your User Content for any Y Combinator-related purpose in any form, medium or technology now known or later developed.

> That’s good info about #1, because it seems to be an O(n * m) problem where n is number of existing copyrighted works and m is the number of uploads.

This is likely very naive of me to ask but is it actually O(n*m)?

I don't know how the fingerprinting works but if it's anything like a hash I don't see why it couldn't be closer to O(n+m) since you only have to hash each copyrighted video once and then compare O(m) uploaded videos against the hashes.

I can imagine you can't actually compare against hashes of all copyrighted videos in O(1) since they can't just be kept in memory but I don't see why it can't be done in O(log n).

Of course this is very far out of my expertise so please someone explain to me why this is completely wrong =]

Hm, good point. I was thinking of the case of manual checking, but good point nonetheless.

Of course, the checksum would have to be invariant to pitch shift, rotation, horizontal flipping, framing, clipping, and length changes — all of which I know have been used to evade copyright filters on YouTube. (Also must resist mild noise audio or visual noise, mild convolution filters, and probably hue shifting, but I don’t know if those have been used by pirates yet)

That's the same as elsewhere though. You never need to state something is copyright; it already is.

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