Legality and effectiveness of Digital Fingerprinting


Legality-
As you've probably figured out by this point, digital fingerprinting can be a powerful -- perhaps even invasive -- technology. Do you like the thought of your every online move being tracked, even if it's only for the purpose of targeted advertising? Here's a better question: Is it even legal?

Identity tracking fingerprinting treads on shaky ethical ground that may be deemed overly invasive and unlawful in the future. But because it's a developing technology, those legal issues are still being sorted out. And with the Internet being a global network, laws regarding digital fingerprinting may develop completely differently from one country to another.
According to Canada's guidelines, a digital fingerprint likely constitutes personal information, so usage of that information could be in violation of Canadian privacy laws. Canadian organizations are required to exhaust every possible non-invasive method of personal identification before resorting to methods like fingerprinting. Because fingerprinting "may collect more information than is necessary to identify fraudulent and duplicate respondents in online research," Canadian organizations could get in trouble for tracking people unless they've received permission or exhausted all other opportunities.
The first form of digital fingerprinting we covered -- matching identifying characteristics of copyrighted media to a database -- doesn't suffer from the same ethical challenges as identity tracking. License holders have the right to protect their content, and nothing about this form of fingerprinting invades the user's privacy. Ideally, fingerprinting will actually decrease the number of copyright infringement lawsuits by stopping the illegal dissemination of licensed media. Viacom's $1 billion lawsuit against YouTube was thrown out of court in 2010 because Google was found to be in compliance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Because the site took down illegal videos when notified, it was protected under the DMCA and wasn't held liable for the actions of its users. With better fingerprinting technology, the lawsuit may never have arisen at all. That statement puts a lot of faith into fingerprinting technology.
Effectiveness-
Digital fingerprinting sounds like the perfect technology to combat Internet piracy. It prevents users from spreading copyrighted content and potentially bypasses the hassle and expense of lawsuits. Once implemented by an organization, digital fingerprinting is a largely automated system, which means less work for content providers and media sites alike. Of course, all that convenience assumes one critical thing: that digital fingerprinting actually works.
Digital fingerprinting must be able to identify thousands or millions of pieces of content -- content that can be disseminated in many media formats, cropped or edited in unexpected ways, or even recorded off a movie theater screen. Video elements like color, bitrate and even resolution can vary from video to video. With all those variables, can digital fingerprinting really work?
In 2007, Audible Magic's Copysense fingerprinting technology was put to the test in an online video site called Soapbox. Soapbox was a Microsoft project that allowed users to upload videos a la YouTube. Even with Audible Magic's fingerprinting technology at work, tech site Gigaom was easily able to upload a copyrighted video from Comedy Central's "The Daily Show". It took days for the clip to be taken down from Soapbox -- even after Gigaom contacted Microsoft and Audible Magic for comment. Thinking the clip would then be indexed and protected against illicit sharing, Gigaom tried to upload it again. It worked. They had similar success on Myspace, which also employs Audible Magic's fingerprinting.
Audible Magic protects against 11 million songs, movies and television shows. But with decades of media at our fingertips in digital form, the software obviously can't safeguard against all illegal uploads. Digital fingerprinting also can't stop most peer-to-peer file sharing, which distributes material directly between users. The effectiveness of digital fingerprinting in the future is entirely up in the air. If companies like Audible Magic continue to improve their recognition systems and expand their fingerprint databases, sites with user-generated content will be easier to maintain and the technology that identifies media will be more powerful than ever. Who knows? In 20 years, apps like Shazam may be able to differentiate between two live concert versions of "Free Bird" based on the length of a guitar solo.




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