“There will always be something that falls into the gray area,” BayTSP CEO Mark Ishikawa told the Wall Street Journal. That’s where his company comes in. BayTSP is currently employed by Viacom for over $100,000 per month—other companies pay up to $500,000 per month—for its services. For that money, BayTSP sends out over a million takedown notices every month and says that clips are often removed within a couple of hours. — Ars Technica
I was reading today on Ars Technica about BayTSP (a digital copyright protection firm) and how they were contracted by Viacom to find and eliminate pirated clips on video sharing sites like YouTube. This is a very interesting idea but could only happen on the west coast. Viacom supposedly pays $100k per month for their services which include paying individuals $11 per hour to sift through videos and send a DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) take down notice. On top of that BayTSP claims they have other corporations paying $500k per month for the same services. Now I can’t imagine many other corporations with the same size pirated portfolio as Viacom on sites like YouTube, so who really is paying those $500k per month fees?
There is no way to see inside the operations at BayTSP but from what I can imagine they have a numerous employees working in cube land and once they spot infringing content they can submit the URL for further investigation. The employees tasked with verifying the content of course would have more experience in these matters and more than likely use a standard DMCA notice which they just paste the offending content URLs into. I just can’t believe and entire industry has sprung up over the past ten years based just on watching online videos!
I think this just proves that DRM and that old media fighting new media is here to stay and prosper!
