MPAA's Johnny to Block Copyrighted Material

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has developed a new tool called ‘Johnny’ in collaboration with video site guba.com to fight piracy of copyrighted material online. ‘Johnny’ will analyze videos in digitized form and will generate a unique fingerprint for each video. Once the video is scanned, it is blocked from illegal file trading or distribution on Guba’s site. The technology will be lent out to similar video sharing sites and Usenet, an electronic bulletin board used for illegal file sharing to filter out videos which have been lifted or even cropped and reformatted. Johnny will also be able to detect reposted or re-encoded content on the sites. Guba executives say they began developing Johnny’s predecessor years ago, in an attempt to deal with copyrighted content but the collaboration with MPAA has finally given it a form. Guba and the MPAA have included thousands of movies and television programs from major studios in Johnny’s filters.