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MPAA helping to create "MD5" type hashes for copyrighted video

extremetech.com — Basically the program takes the video and create a hash from sections of it. That is then stored in a database which can be checked by any company using the service to determine if a submitted video is copyrighted or not.

Who dugg this?

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  • heavyd14, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Why is MD5 in quotes?

    Also, wouldn't changing any attribute of the video change the hash (eg bitrate, resolution, codec, adding a watermark)? The people they interviewed say they transcode it to a specific codec and resolution, but doing so would introduce artifacts and change the hash. That is a lot of hashes to check against. What about clips? It sounds like they will have hashes for small intervals but isn't the has for the first minute and :30 to 1:30 different?

    Seems like a lot of wasted computer time for little result.
  • jjarmoc, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Aside from that, MD5 hashes are NOT unique. Given a large enough set of input, the output will be identical for more than one input.

    I imagine if someone like Youtube, with it's large database of videos, were to MD5 has all their content, that have at least a few examples of hash collisions. In this case, that would mean potentially categorizing non-copyrighted works as copyrighted.

    see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_collision if you care to read more about hash collisions.

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