Japanese Media Wrong in Going After YouTube

Japanese media companies are still complaining to YouTube, especially regarding its Japanese language version, on all the copyrighted shows that show up posted by YouTube users. The Japanese companies claim Google is taking too long in developing video recognition software to find "digital fingerprints" that the copyright holders can provide, and that they want YouTube to "reset" the site. I take it to mean by "reset" they want all videos deleted. However, when it's so easy to digitially record a broadcast, and then convert the movie file to all sorts of different formats (AVI, WMV, MKV, MP4, MPEG, MOV, M4V, etc.), the task of preserving the "digital fingerprint" becomes quite a challenge. Plus, the ease of editing the video may alter any kind of code that's included in the fingerprint.

While the idea of controlling your intellectual property is still one that needs to be protected, broadcasters of mass media may have to rethink, and be honest, about what they're actually protecting. They paid some governing body a lot of money for broadcasting permits and licenses. They wish to recoup those fees, and make profit, through advertising. I really believe it's time to do away with the idea of separate commercials, and have brand logos embedded on the broadcasts, to show who is sponsoring that block of time on the show. Of course, video editing can also cut these logos out of the video file, but new ways of including these images on screen may make the editing time-consuming and work-intensive. Obviously, a shift in how advertising is handled for broadcasts is necessary, and we do not yet know what that may entail. But asking for a website to "reset" itself is stupid in the extreme.