Viacom's YouTube Cop: YouTube's Still Breaking The Law, All The Time (GOOG) - Tech Weblogs

stewart.jpg: Paste this image in your site, Myspace, Facebook, Ebay copy this code...

How's YouTube's filtering system, designed to keep pirated video off the site, working? It's not, says BayTSP, which polices YouTube (GOOG) and other video sharing sites for copyrighted content from the major studios.

BayTSP, which sends out 1 million take-down demands a month on behalf of Viacom (VIA) and other copyright owners, says it has seen no decrease in piracy since YouTube turned on its filtering system in October.

"We are still finding content that should have been caught by the filter, so it is not an effective tool at this point," says Bay TSP CEO Mark Ishikawa, who adds his voice to the murmurings from the media congloms that Google's system, which it started developing 18 months ago, isn't ready for commercial use.

YouTube, of course, disputes this notion, and says 100 partners are successfully using Video ID. And of course, BayTSP has more than a little bit invested in the claim that YouTube's filter is failing: If it wasn't, BayTSP wouldn't be around.

But Ishikawa says the only noticable change in trends came after Viacom sued Google for $1 billion last summer, triggering a flurry of enforcement by other media companies and a relative lull in piracy. As it stands, BayTSP says it identifies 16 millon copyright enfringements on the Web per day--and no decrease in infringements on YouTube.

Last week, BayTSP started trials with a company it believes can help solve the problem: Japanese telco NTT, which has been working on its fingerprinting technology since 1996. The hope is NTT's system will allow Bay TSP to automatically monitor sites like YouTube, Daily Motion, and Yahoo Video, rather than rely on a battery of humans. If it works, he says, he'd be happy to help solve YouTube's problem itself: "We could put our system in and have it operational in 30 days."

In the meantime, here's an excellent Daily Show clip that should be on YouTube, posted Thursday and still available late Sunday night: