Opinion: Tagging and remixing Web video

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Online videos typically come with descriptive tags to make it easier to search for them, but those tags apply to the entire clip. Gotuit Media, which is providing some of the video technology behind Sports Illustrated’s new NFL draft site, offers a way to tag individual scenes, or even portions of scenes, within a clip. The added metadata make it easier for people to watch just the segments they’re most interested in. Read more about the company and its role in the maturation of Web video at the Bit Player blog.

This kind of video segmentation is a boon to the Net’s remix culture, which treats video snippets as units of expression akin to words and images. The remix trend disturbs some copyright holders, who don’t want to see competitors turn their investments into new products without their participation. That’s true even for a hobbyist’s noncommercial mash-up, which can be spun into advertising gold when it drives viewers to a commercial website such as YouTube. Ultimately, how much control copyright holders wield will depend, just as it did in the case of music sampling, on where the courts draw the fuzzy line between fair uses and infringements. If technology like Gotuit’s ultimately promotes remixing, copyright holders will be more likely to resort to another technology covered in these virtual pages recently: Attributor, which scours the Web for unauthorized uses of its customers’ material.