Humans keep YouTube on-task
Awaiting promises from Google to implement a content filtering system, copyright owners like Viacom are hiring actual people to identify infringing material on video-sharing sites like YouTube.
According to The Wall Street Journal, a company called BayTSP has hired about 20 analysts to scour video-sharing sites in search of proprietary material. Upon finding copyrighted content, BayTSP issues takedown notices.
The company issues around a million notices a month, billing around five TV and movie-studio clients up to $500,000 in that time, to police the web. However, analysts say violated clips often go right back up after being taken down.
Though BayTSP has faced criticism for mistakenly reporting non-infringing clips, such as parodies, as copyrighted material, the firm maintains that its error rate hovers around 0.1 percent.
