MySpace are hoping to placate increasingly restless content owners by introducing a new technology which means that once a video has been removed from the social networking platform for copyright reasons it won't, in theory at least, be able to be re-uploaded
The so called 'take down, stay down' feature will, using Audible Magic technology, automatically create a digital fingerprint of any video uploaded by a MySpace user but then removed at the demand of a copyright holder. The fingerprint will then block anyone who attempts to re-upload the video in the future.
The introduction of the technology is a bid to overcome growing concern among content owners who complain that videos they ask to be removed from the MySpace platform are removed but then later reappear because another MySpace user re-uploads them. This increases the amount of monitoring a content owner must do of the massive MySpace network.
Of course, some content owners insist MySpace and their like have a responsibility to ensure unauthorised copyright content doesn't appear on their websites in the first place, and that simply pledging to remove content if and when they are made aware of a copyright violation is not sufficient for the content sharing networks to sidestep liability for that violation.
However, the pledge that any piece of unauthorised content can only appear once and, once it has been identified, will be blocked from future sharing, will placate some content owners - assuming, that is, that the technology actually works.