YouTube‘s Claim Your Content, a video recognition technology supposedly as sophisticated and precise as the FBI’s fingerprint recognition algorithms, will incorporate an AutoShutDown feature when it is introduced early this fall.
YouTube attorney Philip S. Beck told Manhattan U.S. District Judge Louis L. Stanton that the new technology would allow copyright holders to provide a unique “digital fingerprint” on their product which would shut down playback ability within “a minute or so” if the video was illegitimately shared.
Beck told Judge Stanton that YouTube was expecting to introduce this technology “hopefully in September” of this year. Judge Stanton is currently reviewing the suits filed by Viacom, the UK’s Football Association Premier League, and music publisher Bourne Co.
The three companies have sought well over $1 billion in damages and any profits YouTube may have collected as a result of hosting their copyrighted videos. Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt announced Claim Your Content shortly after Viacom’s suit was filed in April.
This is the first time that Google is using Claim Your Content as leverage to demonstrate to the Judge that they are indeed taking steps to stanch the flow of pirated videos on YouTube.
This “shut down” process could theoretically be advanced to all forms of web interaction, and could harken the day when users of illegally obtained software and operating systems could find themselves shut out from various forms of internet access or even have their entire operating system remotely and permanently shut off.
Such a capability to terminate processes running from an individual’s hard drive is a prospect that might delight Silicon Valley and Hollywood but would likely infuriate a significant percentage of computer users around the world.
