It seems that porn detection and copyright detection are fundamentally different problems. Porn is determined by the content, and can be discerned by watching it. While not perfect, one could imagine that image processing techniques could filter a lot of this out (search for a lot of skin tones, natural curves, etc). On the other hand, I can show you a video and it would be perfectly reasonable if you had no idea if it's copyrighted or not. The data is (typically) not in the video itself.

Doesn't Cuban have anything else to do? Go bug Stern or something?

From the comments on Cuban's post: http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~fleck/naked.html

Mark Cuban is a major league asshole who just got lucky when Yahoo flushed $5 billion down the toilet for broadcast.com

I agree, content and copyright are two different issues to argue. Porn is easily obtainable and, while I see no problem putting it on either channel, at the cary least it should be clearly marked as NSFW.

TK

Surely it is more important to filter out adult material than it is to filter copyrighted material in order to protect young surfers.

The difference is that porn is, of course, in the eye of the beholder. Copyrights are a definitive legal entity, and outsiders can prove that they own it.

Google doesn't believe in copyrights as they are currently enforced (and I agree with that view.) They are way too restrictive. So it will conform with copyrights only when it has to – i.e., if CR holders demand it.

Porn is a censorhip issue. Google censors porn to conform to (probably Sergey's) personal values.

The interesting thing is that Google is generally against censorship – others in this forum point out that it does not censor out anti-semitic stuff, for example, despite the fact that Sergey is Jewish.
http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-02-07-n58.html

It just means that we have to accept that Google does censor, and not just in China. Google is becoming the arbiter of what's appropriate on the internet and what is not.

> The difference is that porn is, of course, in
> the eye of the beholder. Copyrights are a
> definitive legal entity

Not sure about that. I believe that both "this is adult content" and "this is a copyright infringement" are debatable statements in many cases. Is the latest Madonna adult content? Maybe if you live in a Muslim country. Is nudity porn? Maybe it's art. Is taking a 15 second clip of the Madonna video infringing on the owner's copyright? It depends on how you interpret fair use, and what kind of fair use laws your country has. Is this video clip given to the public domain? Perhaps, you need to locate the right holders to know for sure. Etc.

In general though, I believe judging on copyright is much tougher to do, simply because you need knowledge of the material: who owns it, when it was produced, who created the music, whether it's short enough to be fair use, what rights were granted by the content owner, what license was attached in the first place, the time the content creator is dead (if they are), what deal was struck with the content, whether or not fees have been paid, which countries the content is distributed to, and so on. You don't need any background knowledge of the content to judge if there's nudity.