A look into the lives of Viacom's copyright police: A YouTube lawyer said in June that the company planned to implement an automatic content filtering system on the site this fall, possibly by September. But even if such a system gets implemented on YouTube—much to the delight of Viacom and many other copyright holders—digital copyright protection company BayTSP believes it will always have a place in the copyright-protection ecosystem.

"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.

Doing so requires human fingers, eyes, and ears to identify the clips and fire off all those takedowns. For eight hours a day, BayTSP's employees search through the millions of clips uploaded to YouTube and other video sites, log lists of videos they believe to be infringing, and send DMCA takedown notices. As for mistakenly sending takedown notices over content that is actually legit, the company claims that such mistakes only happen 0.1 percent of the time. We'll cautiously take their word on that.

Don't go thinking that viewing YouTube clips for a living is as glamorous as it sounds, though. Employees describe their $11 per hour days as monotonous, as it often involves watching the same clip (or variations thereof) thousands of times apiece. Ironically, they somehow manage to get through the day by doing the same thing many of us do—by passing around amusing YouTube clips that they happen to come across in their searches. I guess YouTube is still good for something, even to the copyright cops.

(Read Original Article - Via Law & Disorder Section - Ars Technica.)