"Incidentally google blocks many other undesirable things."
That statement really pisses me off. It also really pissed me off when some politician was like "Google has the technology". Presumably both were referring to SafeSearch and related technologies.
These people have no idea what they are talking about. Blocking porn is an entirely different problem than blocking copyright infringement. Identifying an image as nudity is a task that software can do effectively and that can be crowd sourced in a straight forward manner. Anyone could, without consulting any external source, classify pornography.
However, the same is not true for infringement. The same companies who want their content off of YouTube are publishing free content on YouTube. Google has bent over backwards to block as much infringement as they can and to provide copyright holders the tools they need to manage their intellectual property rights. But the fact remains: you must consult an external source to classify infringing video. Furthermore, fair use is has complex and subtle requirements which are impractical to police using software, crowd sourcing, or enforcement staff.
As I would say if I got 5 min to testify before a congressional committee:
"Gentlemen, it has been suggested that, since Google and others have built technology to detect and block pornographically explicit pictures and videos, that they could build technology to block copyrighted pictures. This is simply not true. Please bear with me and I can demonstrate this. [show two pictures] Can you tell which of these is pornography? It's like Justice Stewart said: 'I know it when I see it'. [show two identical pictures] Can you tell which of these is a copyright violation. [pause] You don't have to peer TOO closely, they are absolutely identical. But the author signed contract allowing me to duplicate and display copies of the one on the left, and did NOT allow me to duplicate and display copies of the one on the right. Determining whether something is a violation of copyright requires one to know details how a court would evaluate fair use exceptions, as well as knowing the details of contracts between two third-parties you may not even know. This is not difficult, it is impossible."
Well you would hope most people would take whatever Rupert Murdoch says with a grain of salt considering the sort of publications his company runs. A man like him doesn't care about the truth.
That statement really pisses me off. It also really pissed me off when some politician was like "Google has the technology". Presumably both were referring to SafeSearch and related technologies.
These people have no idea what they are talking about. Blocking porn is an entirely different problem than blocking copyright infringement. Identifying an image as nudity is a task that software can do effectively and that can be crowd sourced in a straight forward manner. Anyone could, without consulting any external source, classify pornography.
However, the same is not true for infringement. The same companies who want their content off of YouTube are publishing free content on YouTube. Google has bent over backwards to block as much infringement as they can and to provide copyright holders the tools they need to manage their intellectual property rights. But the fact remains: you must consult an external source to classify infringing video. Furthermore, fair use is has complex and subtle requirements which are impractical to police using software, crowd sourcing, or enforcement staff.