... And Stay Down! (MySpace Embraces Takedown Tech)

by Jordan Yerman | May 13, 2007 at 08:28 am

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The main problem with the automated copyright-enforcement technology discussed below is that it is unable to deal with contested copyright; once it makes an automated decision, there is no real dispute process, as the blocked material remains perpetually blocked. In short, leaving this sort of thing to a bot is both super-convenient and super-imprecise.

Faced with the looming threat of more legal action, MySpace announced Friday that it has begun implementing new technology to combat members' unauthorized use of copyrighted content.

Aptly titled "Take Down Stay Down," the new feature is a content protection measure based on Audible Magic technology. The company says this will ensure that video content that has been pulled from MySpace member profiles at the request of copyright holders cannot be re-posted.

"We have created this new feature to solve a problem that has long frustrated copyright holders and presented technical challenges to service providers," said Michael Angus, executive vice president and general counsel for Fox Interactive Media--the division of parent company News Corp. that includes MySpace--in a statement Friday.

Copyright owners have access to Take Down Stay Down free of charge, according to a release from MySpace. If the social-networking service receives a takedown notice regarding a copyrighted clip hosted through its MySpace Videos hosting service, MySpace's new feature will take a "digital fingerprint" of the video and add it to a copyright filter that blocks the content from being uploaded again. "(It's) the ability to have a piece of content imprinted and put in a database so we can identify it," said Vance Ikezoye, CEO of Audible Magic.