[Cryptography] YouTube ContentID hacked for the good!

[Henry Baker]

FYI --

http://kotaku.com/game-critic-uses-brilliant-workaround-for-youtubes-copy-1773452452

Game Critic Uses Brilliant Workaround For YouTube's Copyright Bullshit 

Patricia Hernandez
Wednesday 5:00pm
Filed to: Jim Sterling

Thank god for Jim Sterling, a game critic whose recent YouTube antics forced YouTube’s copyright system to eat itself alive. Here’s how he did it.

As you may already know, YouTube has something called “Content ID,” which is a system that theoretically allows users to identify and manage their videos.

Basically, once a video is online, viewers can put a digital fingerprint on it.  If another YouTube channel uploads a video, and the system believes that the new video has the same digital fingerprint, then the new video gains a Content ID claim.  The owners of the original Content ID can then gain some ownership over the new video, and YouTube allows them to monetize the video for themselves, or sometimes outright block it.
...

So, Jim Sterling hatched a plan.  He went back through his older videos, and took note of what footage got slammed with a Content ID claim in the past.  He then went ahead and copied that same flagged footage, and stuck it into his new video.  The self-sabotage was intentional: Sterling wanted to fuck with the Content ID system.

“I figured every time I talk about Nintendo, I’m going to throw in other stuff that gets flagged by Content ID, and just watch the corporations battle it out,” Sterling said.  His hope was that by pulling this stunt, he could stop any company from monetizing the video at all, since it wouldn’t be clear who really owned the footage in the first place.  And if anybody did manage to monetize the video, they’d probably only get peanuts for it.

The scheme panned out just the way he thought it would, Jim Sterling tells Kotaku. 

“I can confirm it works,” Jim Sterling said over email.  “It’s worked several times before.  WMG tried to monetize the video for the Erasure music, but couldn’t because Nintendo and Take-Two had set their ContentID in this particular case to Not Monetized.”

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ContentID is a database of digital "fingerprints" of snippets of media files.

I'd say that Jim Sterling found a way to include his own middle fingerprint in his new video!