Bot on way to catch YouTube copyright violators?
Now here's an idea that is needed, and may already be in the works.
How about a bot that crawls YouTube videos for apparently unauthorized, copyright violations? The type of violations that given the ease of tv-to-PC digital transfer are easy to commit?
Such as video clips of tv shows, such as "Lost?" Speaking of, that's a YouTube "Lost" clip at the top of this post.
There's a few ways this could be facilitated.
First, television programmers and movie studios might want to either imbed a digital video watermark inside their content that could be machine-readable by copyright-violation sniffer bots they would search YouTube with.
Alternatively, television programmers and movie studios could insert digital code that could break YouTube's Flash-enabled video engine.
Until such technology is enabled, there's always the old-fashioned way: mechanical searches of YouTube with search keywords that would match movie or television program titles. Then, physically examine each one, and if they see a copyright violation, request that YouTube delete it.
I'm not just engaging in wild speculation here. When YouTube is acquired- I said "when," not "if"- it will likely be by a media company with substantial copyrighted assets, as well as partnerships with other copyright holders. At that point, the party will be over.