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Comment by pyre | Hacker News Reader

Right, because we have automated software child pornography recognizers.

Not only do these exist, there are significant institutional practices that exist to facilitate the sharing of detection signatures between companies and between companies and various governments.

It's good to prevent the re-sharing of child pornography, but a lot of companies don't like to talk about the systems because they're very much the same systems that the same companies are busy telling the content industry that they can't build to enforce copyrights. So they're generally kept pretty hush-hush by a kind of gentleman's agreement.

I think general copyright is actually a thornier problem and this secrecy is unnecessary. CP is just something you can block if you see it. Tracking down exactly which uses of a copyrighted work are intended to be allowed and which are not is really much harder. And I think that's a legitimate argument, especially because it recasts the copyright debate in terms of compromises that make sense: if clearing a bunch of rights is confusing, maybe certain types of compulsory licenses are more attractive. But that debate is for another thread...

  | I think general copyright is actually a thornier
  | problem and this secrecy is unnecessary

1. When we talk about 'detecting copyright infringement' there is an implicit assumption that we're talking about the IP of major corporations. No one is going to bend over backwards to prevent copyright infringement of 'the small guy'[1].

2. Even if you detect that a video contains copyrighted material, there is no central registry for you to determine if the person (or entity) has permission to distribute/use that material. Even if there was such a registry, how do you link it to an online id on some random website?

3. There is no middle-ground for fair use. Fair Use is something that is usually only definitively determined after a court battle. If restrictions are too strict, then the only way for one to exercise their Fair Use rights is a court battle. This effectively means that Fair Use would be dead for all but some rich, motivated people (at least on large content networks, e.g. YouTube).

[1] Unless it wins brownie points with the public for getting a system in place to protect the 'big guys,' who are obviously the only ones that matter.

We do: Automatic detection of child pornography using color visual words - http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=60...

Automatic detection of child pornography - http://ro.ecu.edu.au/adf/60/

I wouldn't call it a dectector:

  our approach can achieve a prioritization of
  content (equal error 11 – 24%) to improve the
  efficiency of forensic investigations of child
  sexual abuse

at least not in the context of this discussion of fully automated solutions.

It wouldn't be surprising. YouTube looks for video fingerprints of copyrighted data. Repurposing such technology to find copies of known CP videos would be pretty straightforward.

Wouldn't help you with new material, of course.

If you start filtering for child pornography, and people know about it, they will come at your hard if you miss anything. Even for a technology that gets all known child porn videos, people would be beating down the door to sue/bad mouth Facebook for missing the new ones. Mostly due to people being people, but also because the technology is 'magical' to far too many people in society so they feel like there are no limitations (or it's hard for them to grasp them).

They already have image algorithms to detect nudity with a good degree of accuracy so that's probably enough to forbid an image or video.

Like that won't cause a shitstorm. A social networking site that won't let people trade possibly nude images privately?

I don't think he's talking about necessarily private, but they detect nudity on the "publicly" available images available in your albums which your friends an see...

http://petapixel.com/2012/11/25/facebook-removes-risque-phot...

That sort of thing might also flag a benign "Baby's first bath" video as child porn.

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