On Sunday night, the prestigious Hugo Awards were held in Chicago, recognizing excellence in science fiction. Realizing that we live in the future, the powers that be decided to air the awards ceremony live on the internet through Ustream so anyone in the world with an internet connection could see the awards as they happen. Things were going just fine until Ustream’s copyright robots decided to shut the broadcast down in the middle of Neil Gaiman’s acceptance speech for an episode of Doctor Who. The reason? Copyright violation. Ustream CEO Brad Hunstable explained on the company’s official blog:
This occurred because our 3rd party automated infringement system, Vobile, detected content in the stream that it deemed to be copyrighted. Vobile is a system that rights holders upload their content for review on many video sites around the web. The video clips shown prior to Neil’s speech automatically triggered the 3rd party system at the behest of the copyright holder.
As you might expect, this was an error. The Hugo folks, being a responsible organization, had obtained the rights to broadcast the clips of Doctor Who and Community that triggered the false copyright takedown. So, fine. An automated bot popped an false positive, and Ustream can just restart the feed, right? I mean, Ustream couldn’t possibly have built an automated system without a fail safe, right?
Our editorial team and content monitors almost immediately noticed a flood of livid Twitter messages about the ban and attempted to restore the broadcast. Unfortunately, we were not able to lift the ban before the broadcast ended.
Which, of course, leads us to 2001: A Space Odyssey, the Hugo Award winner from 1969.
False positives happen and are almost unavoidable when dealing with automated systems, but I think we can all agree that it’s downright irresponsible for a multimillion dollar company to create a system that doesn’t permit intelligent human beings to override a poorly programmed bot. Ustream has temporarily suspended the bot in question, but remember, the copyright holders are the customer here, not end-users. With that in mind one has to wonder how concerned the company really is about repairing the system. After all, one false positive is a small price to pay for a system that clearly works.
Isn’t that right, HAL?
* Yes, I know “I can’t let you do that” isn’t the line.
[via io9]
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