Posted on Friday, August 24 2007 @ 3:20 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
Microsoft's Associate General Counsel for Copyright Thomas Rubin said that Microsoft's Soapbox online video application as for more responsible than Google's YouTube and doesn't take advantages of loopholes in copyright laws:
He said that Microsoft's Soapbox video-sharing site is designed to work in concert with copyright holders and that it represents an effort to be a good corporate citizen. Soapbox uses Audible Magic fingerprinting technology.
In a swipe at Google, which has been sued by Viacom over the presence of numerous copyrighted videos on YouTube, Rubin said at the Progress & Freedom Foundation's Aspen Summit that Microsoft "could have looked for potential loopholes in the DMCA or the fair-use provisions of the Copyright Act...but it would have done nothing to address the significant and legitimate concerns of the content industry." (The DMCA is, of course, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which sets rules for Web site liability.)
"Before a video is uploaded to the site, before it gets posted, there is a fingerprint taken of the file that identifies what that file is, and it's checked against the database that the content industry has created and populated (to tell) whether the uploaded file is infringing," Rubin said. "If it is, we don't allow it to go up. It's that simple."
Source: CNET
