Tag: Digital

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.

Digital Fingerprinting Explained

Digital fingerprinting is the identification of large data files or structures using truncated information. A fingerprinting algorithm is one that reduces a larger data set to a very small data set, sometimes called a bit string, to promote efficient identification and search protocols.

One type of common fingerprint algorithm is called a hash function. These functions change a larger data set, sometimes known as a key, into a shorter data set, which may be called a hash. These altered pieces of data help make search techniques more agile.

One type of digital fingerprinting application is related to new digital media files. Experts note that digital fingerprinting helps a user locate a specific file to verify whether a file has been altered, while actually facilitating copyright protection. This involves using a fingerprint identifier to conduct protected file searches for other online file instances. Digital fingerprinting plays other roles for average end users, such as verifying whether particular file instances have been altered.

Digital fingerprinting technology relies on complex computer-driven analysis to identify a piece of media like a song or video clip. Here’s where the fingerprint analogy is born: Just like every person has a unique fingerprint, every piece of media has identifying features that can be spotted by smart software. But what good does this kind of identification really do? Sites like YouTube can scan files and match their fingerprints against a database of copyrighted material and stop users from uploading copyrighted files. Sounds simple, right? Surprisingly, people often confuse digital fingerprinting with watermarking or don’t have a clear picture of what the technology entails.

Part of the problem is that the term “digital fingerprinting” can actually refer to two entirely different things. The first meaning we’ve already covered, but the second works from a more traditional fingerprint analogy, equating your personal computer to an online fingerprint that can be used to track your online activity. Both concepts refer to a unique identifier, but with completely different functionalities — this second meaning has nothing to do with spotting copyrighted songs or videos. Neither one involves scanning real fingerprints, but they’re pretty cool technologies anyway. Let’s take a look at how they work.

Reasons for Digital Fingerprinting

The last two pages established that the term “digital fingerprinting” applies to two entirely different technologies. The thing they have in common, of course, is a computerized form of identification. Now that we’ve established how each technology works, let’s examine how each is used. YouTube presents an easy starting point. Copyright infringement constantly threatens the video site, and in 2007 Viacom sued Google for $1 billion over clips available on YouTube [source: CNET]. Google didn’t upload the clips itself, but it didn’t stop users from uploading the clips, either. Policing a site as large as YouTube is a huge challenge — how can Google keep unlicensed content out?

With digital fingerprinting. Google uses software it calls YouTube Video Identification to sort through uploaded videos and recognize copyrighted content. It also gives copyright owners the control to deny uploads or even monetize their content [source: YouTube] . This form of digital fingerprinting actually serves two purposes: It protects Google from harmful lawsuits and limits the unlicensed spread of copyrighted material. Ideally, this means both the companies that own the copyright and the companies who host that content online are protected by fingerprinting. The content isn’t spread illegally, and sites like YouTube avoid nasty lawsuits.

Of course, digital fingerprinting doesn’t have to be a restrictive technology. Another excellent example of fingerprinting at work is Shazam, the music identification app that can match a song’s audio sample to a musical database [source: Everything Else Matters Too]. On smart phones, Shazam uses a microphone to pick up audio from a song, analyzes it, and uses that data to find a match. Shazam then pulls up a page of information on the song and artist and provides quick access to a music store where an MP3 of the song can be purchased.

We’ve described how digital fingerprinting can be used to track PCs across the Internet based on various characteristics that make up a digital fingerprint. That same tracking technology can be used for security, as well. Pirates and Internet users who upload and download illicit material can be identified, tracked and even arrested using the power of digital fingerprinting. And because identification doesn’t rely on an IP address alone, pirates who access the Internet from different places on the same device can still be pinned down.

Obviously, tracking criminals is a noble use of digital fingerprinting — but if this is starting to sound like an invasion of privacy to you, you might be onto something.