How Serious Is Justin.tv About Fighting Live Broadcasting Piracy? | Hacker News Reader

How Serious Is Justin.tv About Fighting Live Broadcasting Piracy?

techcrunch.com

Cross post from TechCrunch:

Justin.tv employee here.

I want to clear up two things. First, we get more uploaded video than YouTube by about 30% (yes, I am serious) and monitoring all of it is not feasible. Over 150 copyright holders (ex. MLB, ESPN, etc) have access to a tool that lets them instantly remove videos. The request is filed as a DMCA take down notice and processed immediately. We do not take any delay for human processing, it's immediately removed. We could process normal email messages, as other companies do, and take down the videos several hours later. That offers a substandard solution for live content though, so we added this extra level of protection.

Second, the live fingerprinting is a double trigger system. We send our scans to Vobile, who matches it against copyright holders who have allowed us to scan for their content. That is running with Fox and has been tested with the NFL/NBC.

In the screenshot you posted, many, if not all of the rights holders for those broadcasts could choose to remove them instantly.

Over 150 copyright holders (ex. MLB, ESPN, etc) have access to a tool that lets them instantly remove videos.

It's really really sad to me that this sort of thing is necessary. What is to stop one of these people from abusing this power? I'm not angry with you guys, you have to do what you have to do to stay in business, I'm mad at the fact that we've gotten to this point at all.

They're legally obligated to take down only content that is infringing their rights. We'll respond to DMCA counter-notices also, though I don't know that we've ever received one. At that point, it's a matter for the courts to settle.

That's great, but when at any given time a very high percentage of the most popular content is obviously in violation it doesn't seem like you're very serious about it. You don't need to monitor everything, just monitor what's popular.

A $6/hr intern could rid your site of pirated content, but you don't do that because it would also rid your site of viewers.

How do you suggest this intern should determine whether or not the broadcaster has the rights to the content they're broadcasting? There have certainly been companies that have decided to use Justin.tv legitimately without telling us first.

Create a new level of user for legitimate media partners and require them to use it. If thefutureman11 is playing WWE Raw events it's a clear cut violation. (He is too, 500 people are watching.)

Where's the line, though? Somebody owns the copyright to everything that's been created in the last 70 years, at least. Why should we treat some of it with more rigor than the rest?

That's the whole point behind the DMCA safe harbor provisions; in a dispute between copyright holders and users of a service, there's a set of actions that keep the service provider out of harm's way. Deviating from that path in either direction may cause legal troubles for the service provider.

Teams of lawyers for every major copyright holder already have a tool that lets them take down any pirated content that they want. What makes you believe giving that same tool to a $6/hour intern would somehow magically fix the problem?

The real solution is probably going to be the filtering we're adding. So far it's been very effective for Fox; we're working on getting other copyright holders signed up.

"Justin.tv has taken a leadership position among live streaming sites by entering into an agreement with Fox to work together on copyright protection for live streaming content. Justin.tv, with consultation from Fox, is implementing an innovative and industry-leading filtering solution designed to prevent copyrighted content from appearing on Justin.tv without authorization."

http://www.businessinsider.com/justintv-signs-deal-with-fox-...

I think an intern would work because simply looking at the popular content on your site leads to obviously pirated material. Whatever you have isn't effective if your leader boards are full of copyrighted content.

There are a lot of smart people working at Justin.tv so this isn't news to you--it's clear that part of your game plan is to get away with peddling stolen content. Having a takedown button for media partners is a way for you to look the other way while most of your popular content is illegitimate. YouTube did it and they are rich now right?

Having an intern look at our content would weaken our claims to protection under the DMCA.

Having an intern look at just some of our content would leave us wide open to legal action from anything that slipped through the net.

No intern would ever be able to review all of our content, because our users are uploading content at a rate that's 30% higher than Youtube's users.

So what you're actually proposing is: We should weaken our legal position, and then we should encourage legal action.

Like it or not, the current legal framework makes it a bad idea to have employees reviewing our content.

Monitoring their content with a human-in-the-loop would take the outside of the conditions for DMCA safe harbor: http://www.chillingeffects.org/dmca512/faq.cgi#QID129

This is a key condition for all service providers under DMCA -- if you have someone that is looking at the content, you are then liable for all the content on your network.

In essence, this $6/hr intern would cost justin.tv their ability to defend against suits via the DMCA. There would simply be no way for them to operate as a UGC business.

Isn't TechCrunch one of the first investors in UStream.tv, the competitor to Justin.tv with almost as many users and live streams? Why do they choose JTV to write about instead of the possibility that anybody could attempt to broadcast anything on any live video web site? You can also find minutes and minutes of NFL (professional football) video on YouTube right now that have been posted for years and years as an example, and YouTube is about 5 years old and is owned by Google and should have even better technology than Justin.tv, a two year old startup, right?

I would understand the point if other live video sites (and static video sites like YouTube) had better technology to detect this stuff, but they don't.

This is like complaining about Apple for rejecting lots of developers during the app store beta when other mobile companies didn't even have anything similar. Surely, they could have hired $6/hr interns to approve more developers!

A commenter on TC makes the same point:

"I think Techcrunch is displaying some significant bias here.

First of all lets get the fact straight – one of Techcrunch’s advertisers and partners is Ustream a company that is fighting neck and neck with Justin.tv. Ustream has paid Techcrunch as an advertiser, streams their events for free, and has even setup a live cam in their office.

I think Michael Arrington should come clean in any story written on Techcrunch where a competing company has this level of connection with his blog.

Secondly, Justin.tv is taking a lead in the industry to try to prevent copyrighted content on the site. This story has done nothing to look at the other sites in the industry and compare Justin.tv’s efforts with theirs.

Lastly, Fox a big content company, has already stated publicly that Justin.tv has taken a leadership position on this front.

I think this story is unfortunate for Justin.tv – but I wonder why Robin didn’t write the same story about Youtube."

Breaking a rule or two (or turning a blind eye to users that are breaking a rule or two) in an attempt to get large is a tried-and-true startup strategy. If you get large, you'll hopefully have access to the resources required to figure out a way out of your mess, and if you don't - well, most startups fail anyway. This is actually an area where startups have an advantage, because more established competitors have something to lose.

An example: the online mortgage lead generation companies were breaking every regulation in the book when they started - mainly due to ignorance. (Who has time to read state mortgage law?) But by the time the attorney generals of various states started suing them, they had the cashflow to begin the very expensive process of getting registered as a mortgage broker in fifty different states. Worked out rather well for the bigger parties.

I don't really understand why, at least for sports, they care as much. You are still watching the advertisements that they want you to watch; the only difference i can think of is how difficult it is to track how many people are watching. If anything, this just proves that there is a market for putting live sports online with the same commercials and people will still watch.

Because a lot of the sports they screen illegally are pay-per-view.

It has to do (I assume) with markets. They can control who sees what ad based on where they are. Not so with the internet.

Well, they can even more so with the internet, just not when people pirate via justin.tv and ustream.

Sports are by a mile the most valuable content on television, and the only thing that you can't watch online.

Any revenue they could make with online ads would be irrelevant compared to the TV contracts. Here's some anecdotal data:

Baseball:

- Fox pays MLB $625 million per year to show the World Series, every other NLCS and ALCS, the All-Star game, and 26 Sunday Night games. In addition, Fox pays $43 million per year for an additional 2 games during the week with no exclusivity.

- Simultaneously, TBS pays for one Sunday afternoon game per week, and the remaining NLCS and ALCS games not shown on Fox. I couldn't find a price-tag, but based on similar deals $200MM/year is about right.

- On top of that, ESPN pays $80 million per year for 2 games on Wednesday and the Sunday night game.

- In addition, the rest of the games are sold to major and local networks. There are > 2400 MLB games in the regular season alone.

Football:

- ESPN pays $1.1 billion per year just to show the Monday Night Football game

- NBC pays $600 million per year for the Sunday night game. Interestingly, the Sunday night game is the most expensive 30 second spot on a recurring TV program, at $400,000 per spot.

- If you're at all familiar with the NFL, you'll know about the ongoing drama between the NFL network, Comcast, TWC, and DirecTV. I don't know what DirecTV is paying for the rights to broadcast every game, but I would be shocked if its less than $1 billion per year.

And that's just some of baseball and football. There's no way in hell online ads are worth threatening that cash cow.

Unless I'm mistaken though, the OP's point is that if you're streaming the video directly from the network justin.tv's stream will still have the FOX, ESPN, et al, ads in place.

The real threat would be a live stream from the game or as another poster said, PPV content.

Right, but of my monthly TWC bill, $45 is for internet and $90 is for cable. If I cancel the cable because I can watch everything online, they'll have a very difficult time recouping that $1080/year another way.

That's bad for the content producers as well (NFL, MLB, etc). They don't want their best customers going out of business. Nothing online can offer them anywhere close to the money they get from cable and DirectTV contracts (yet).

So although there may be some additional revenue opportunities through online viewing, neither the NFL or the cable company will risk cannibalizing their main source of income.

You can actually stream Sunday Night Football through NBC's site: http://nbcsports.msnbc.com/id/26393211

It's actually a very cool setup, allowing you to choose your own camera angles or watch in HD. There are no commercials, but the main stream does default to a "stay tuned" screen during commercial breaks.

I'm not sure why exactly they offer this service (from a business perspective), but it's certainly worth taking a look at- if not at least for the bit of tech wizardry going on.

MLB does put their games online, but it's a pay service. Similarly, you can buy a cable/satellite package to watch out of town NFL/NHL/NBA games but those are all fairly expensive packages.

I'm thinking, despite the employee's post to the thread, that Justin.tv is not very serious at all - or rather that they hope that the system they've setup isn't used much.

I know probably a dozen people who've used Justin.tv to catch an out of town game, especially during the NFL season; I don't know a single person who has ever used Justin.tv for anything else. Most of those people don't even know it's meant for something other than picking up a game.

I thought Justin.tv did away with popup ads... and yet there they are again?? :)

Anyway.. a lot of the channels they must know about! they broadcast film/tv regularly...

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