NEC Corporation has unveiled a new digital fingerprinting technology aimed at screening out illegal content online.  Movie studios could use it to hunt for unapproved distributions of their works on video sharing sites like YouTube.  And authorities could use it to try to locate and remove unwanted content such as videos containing child predation, terrorist themes, or leaked confidential performances (such as celebrity sex tapes).

Most current digital fingerprinting schemes work by compressing a video stream and comparing it to a known signature.  The new technology uses this approach.  An advantage is that the technology can detect short clips -- as little as 2 seconds (60 frames) of video.  Also, as the signature is small, 76 bytes in length, an average PC can match 1,000 hours of video in 1 second.  

NEC also claims a very low false alarm rate -- 5 ppm (5 in one million) in independent testing.  And it claims a high accurate detection rate of 96 percent.

The company boasts, "This new technology enables content holders and service providers to automatically detect illegal copies and prevent illegal upload of video content on the Internet by registering original video content. These developments are expected to significantly reduce the time and cost of manual content inspections as well as improve the scale and accuracy of content assessment. "

Early targets may be copyrighted videos with caption overlays, camera captured copies and analog copies, all of which can be detected with the tech.

Possible downsides include that copyright holders may use it to take down mash-up videos, a growing form of internet expression, or remove fan subtitled anime or foreign videos, not currently available for legitimate purchase in the U.S.  For NEC, a Japanese corporation, fan subbing hits very close to home.  Anime studios argue that if they don't release a title in the U.S., viewers in the U.S. should not have access to it.

NEC explicitly mentions these kinds of uses, so it seems very likely that this may occur.

Another issue is that the technology could be used to prevent you from making backup copies of videos you own.  Movie and music industry legal representatives have insisted that making copies of content you legitimately own is just another form of stealing.  Advocates, though, claim that you should be free to do what you want with content you purchase and point out that many kinds of content like CDs or DVDs are easily damaged.  It's often hard to obtain replacement discs from the seller, and even when you can do so, they often charge high fees $5-$10 USD or more.

In this case, NEC did make it clear that it primarily envisions this tech being used online, but it could just as easily be included as part of a DRM package.  And under the upcoming ACTA legislation attempting to circumvent such protections becomes a crime.

Ultimately, the technology won't do a whole lot that isn't already done on YouTube or other major video sites.  The big difference will be it will do it just a little bit better.  However, it will allow for fan subtitled and mash-up videos to be detected and removed, perhaps for the first time.  So enjoy your "Power Level 9000??!?" videos while they last.