US firm gives finger to digital pirates

New York-based media monitoring firm, Competitrack, has introduced the latest weapon against piracy in the form of its video fingerprinting technology for policing online video piracy and copyright infringement.

The system is targeted at video sharing websites like YouTube and Metacafe to help them avoid unlawfully displaying copyrighted materials and uses a combination of rack-mounted hardware and client software.

The technology uses advanced digital pattern recognition technology and can locate content from movies, music videos, television programmes, and even B-roll. The company says full motion and still video clips each have their own unique fingerprint of sound and light patterns that are detectable with advanced software algorithms.

Competitrack claims its system is superior to other fingerprinting technology because instead of analysing just the audio or closed caption portion of a video track, the system identifies both sound and video luminescence patterns on a frame-by-frame basis. In addition, the system generates few false positives and is fully automated, which greatly reduces resource allocations and staff involvement.

Even quality of the pirated content appears not to be an issue. Grainy, low quality, and even resized and bitrate-converted formats have been properly detected in current client implementations, the firm said. Competitrack claims to be able to detect pirated content with clips as short as five seconds long, and no audio is required at all.