Comment by evansolomon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by evansolomon | Hacker News Reader

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.

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