“We have created this new feature to solve a problem that has long frustrated copyright holders and presented technical challenges to service providers — how to prevent copyrighted content from being reposted by the same or a different user after it has been taken down by the copyright owner,” MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe said.
The new copyright protection feature, whose holders can use free of charge, is based on content-recognition technology created by Los Gatos, Calif.-based Audible Magic, a company that specializes in electronic media identification and copyright management tools.
According to Audible Magic, when a copyright owner uses the Take Down Stay Down feature on MySpace, the software creates a digital fingerprint of the content, and that fingerprint is then added to a copyright filter. If any user subsequently tries to upload the same content, the filter will recognize the fingerprint, and prevent the content from being uploaded.
CEO of Audible Magic Vance Ikezoye summed up the system as “the ability to have a piece of content imprinted and put in a database so we can identify it.”
Thus far, copyright law and technology experts are giving the Take Down Stay Down system mixed reviews.
“Obviously, MySpace is saying we’ve got to be using a stronger technology that not only takes down the accused material, but also ensures that it never gets put back up again,” said Randy Lipsitz of the New York-based law firm Kramer Levin. “From a copyright point of view, and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, I think that’s a good thing.”
Other analysts question whether an automated system is capable of taking some of copyright law’s more subtle aspects — like the doctrine of “fair use” — into account.
“There’s a general problem with automatic filtering technologies, and I think we know about that,” said Corynne McSherry, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “The concern that I would have is, for example, it’s contested as to whether or not that content is infringing at all. I’m not seeing any process here that allows for that.”
It remains to be seen if MySpace will offer a system for reversing takedown requests in situations where infringement is contested, an ambiguity that serves as another source of discomfort for critics like the EFF.
“If you want to build in a digital fingerprint, you need to have a backstop, you need to have safeguards,” McSherry said. “If there’s a counter-notice with respect to a particular piece of material, this automatic digital fingerprint should be removed because it may not be applicable there. At the very least, a human should make the decision.”
Another question is whether users can circumvent the content recognition technology. Ikeyoze said that getting around the filter would be very difficult, because “fingerprint is much more robust at identifying the content” than the hash values typically used by file recognition software.
“We simulate the human perception of the same content,” Ikeyoze said, adding that their software could recognize the same content even after it has been translated to a variety of different format types and/or compressed to a lesser quality.
McSherry noted that history suggests that any digital protection measure can be defeated by determined hackers.
“It certainly is true that with every form of digital rights management that we’ve ever seen, it always gets hacked eventually,” McSherry said. “I think it’s likely that eventually this too will be hacked. It’s just a matter of time.”