UnNews:YouTube suffers heavy load, blocked videos due to "improved" song detection
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This article is part of UnNews, your source for up-to-the-picosecond misinformation. |
10 January 2013
SILICON VALLEY, CA -- Google subsidiary YouTube has come under fire after rolling out its "new and improved" song detection technology for "protecting the rights of artists and reducing the effect of piracy", after reports of it being slightly too zealous. Slow loading times and inability to view videos outside of the United States are the result of a bug, which in turn resulted in a rollback of the code just a few hours after implementation.
As it is not enough to simply apply a Fourier transform and check if any of the uploaded audio appears in a song database, the technology has gone one step further: analysing the structure of the music itself (analysing the instruments used is too weak, as covers are a form of copyright infringement). Furthermore, videos tend to include multiple songs, so each song must be listed. The reason YouTube became nigh unusable was that the bulk of the song detection relied on a song's chord progression, resulting in approximately 700,000 of the songs in the database ultimately being detected as the same song.
This created widespread slowdowns, not only due to having to transport approximately 30MB of information per video before the users even had the required information to start viewing the video, but the sheer amount of cross-server traffic caused by querying a large proportion of the servers in each of Google's server farms. Furthermore, YouTube viewers from outside of the United States were denied access to most of these videos, due to companies such as Sony blocking every country lacking lobbyists in government.
RIAA vice-president Chris Bush was at first angered by the bug in the code, calling the programmers at Google "a bunch of overpaid crazed monkeys" who "don't know how to run a web server," and even threatened legal action against YouTube for the blunder. Once the cause of the bug was isolated, a formal apology was given to the RIAA, along with the reason behind why the bug occurred.
"This has come as a shock to all of us," Chris stated on his personal blog early this morning. "In these past few hours, we've been angry at YouTube, but since I received their letter, I almost think that, for once, we might have done something wrong."
The music industry has been attack in the past by independent critics, criticising the lack of variety in pop music over the past few years, citing the overuse of the same I, V, vi, IV chord progression, the dominant-yet-easy-to-synthesise hypersaw, and the industry-mandated requirement of a thick layer of Autotune. But this is the first time that an accidental scientific experiment of this scale has taken place and come to the same conclusion.
The RIAA have announced they have no plans to change their general schedule.
