Eyealike may be a tiny company, but it's hoping to bring some big changes to the landscape of online copyright.
President Greg Heuss said Eyealike Copyright, which is launching at DEMO, will allow both copyright-holders and content-hosting sites to search for copyrighted material faster and more accurately.
Eyealike faces tough competition in this field – for example, Audible Magic has been successful developing similar technology for audio media, and may expand into video, and YouTube is developing in-house tools as well.
But Heuss said competitors have only achieved an accuracy rate of 65 to 70 percent. Eyealike Copyright, on the other hand, has 95 percent accuracy, and virtually never creates "false positives" by pointing the finger at legal material. With that kind of success rate, Eyealike could dramatically reduce the presence of music videos, movie clips and other infringing material on sites such as YouTube.
According to Eyealike, the key to its success is a frame-by-frame analysis of the movement of objects within the footage. This is more effective than competing techniques like image or facial recognition alone, the company says, because it can locate most infringing material no matter how well-hidden. If the video has been cropped, for example – and Heuss said recording footage in a movie theater is just another kind of cropping – Eyealike can still find it because the motion in the reduced footage remains the same.
Eyealike has been developing its "visual search platform" for four years. Heuss said the Bellevue, Wash. company's six employees received help from University of Washington Prof. Linda Shapiro, who sits on Eyealike's board. The company is already using this technology in Eyealike Faces, as we reported, which can locate celebrities or potential dates who look similar to uploaded images. In addition to Faces and Copyright, the company will unveil a third product in a few months. So far, Eyealike has been privately funded for $1.6 million, but it will be seeking its first round of venture dollars soon, Heuss said.
Heuss gave me a brief demonstration of Eyealike Copyright, in which the program located an infringing music video by comparing copyrighted footage with material posted on a video Web site (see screenshot below). At the same time, Eyealike Copyright uses several measures, such as the length of clips, to distinguish between infringing video and footage that's in compliance with fair-use laws.
"It can be and likely will be, for the right customer, a completely automatic process," Heuss said.
Eyealike has gotten positive responses from both Web sites and major studios, he said, although nondisclosure agreements prevent him from identifying specific companies. Heuss said Eyealike's new software can help bridge the "vast canyon between the Sonys of the world and the YouTubes" by giving both sides assurance that they can reliably and easily locate infringing material.
I was skeptical of the company's claim that Eyealike Copyright could lead to "ending the copyright law wars online," and when I pressed Heuss, he acknowledged that no software is likely to resolve all the disagreements between users, video sites and movie studios.
Even with cutting-edge technology, the copyright disputes will continue --and that's a can of thriving worms.