YouTube Piracy Fighter

Google unveiled new tactics and a long promised video filtering system Monday that is designed to give owners of copyrighted videos more control over whether their material appears on YouTube and ease the concerns of media content providers.

As YouTube’s popularity has soared, large media companies have grown increasingly frustrated at the amount of pirated content on the video sharing site. Last March, Viacom, which owns MTV, VH1, Nickelodeon and Comedy Central, sued Google, which owns YouTube, for massive copyright infringement and demanded $1 billion in damages. This was quickly followed by the English Premier Football League.

Google on Monday began offering what it’s calling “YouTube Video Identification,” which will make it easier for the afore mentioned companies, and others, to identify their content and to manage how it is made available on the site.

Google said nine media firms, including Walt Disney and Time Warner participated in a test of the product. A spokesman for Time Warner said the technology was a work in progress but a good start. “We’re encouraged that Google recognizes the need to protect copyright,” said spokesman Edward Adler. Several other media firms, including suiter Viacom, also said they were encouraged by the new effort, but said Google and YouTube have goodwill to make up to copyright owners.

Zahavah Levine, chief counsel at YouTube, said the new system shows that Google has been operating in good faith. For months, Google has responded to complaints by media companies that it is working to create state of the art technology to filter copyrighted videos.

Patrick Ross, executive director of the Copyright Alliance, a trade group of media companies and other copyright holders, described what Google is doing as ” a first step.”

“In this digital age, it’s very important that when businesses make money off of other people’s content, they make an effort to police that content,” he said.

Ross said one concern was whether Google would offer its anti-piracy technology only to content owners who signed licensing deals favorable to YouTube, putting small copyright holders at a disadvantage. Google said this technology is open to anybody, regardless of what their business relationship is with the site.

Google had been using technology provided by Audible Magic to identify copyrighted music. David King, a product manager at YouTube, said the new system goes far beyond that and matches the content of videos. King said it is “extremely complex” and took a long time to develop. He said engineers attempting to describe the system created a power point presentation containing 50 pages of differential equations.

Dubbed “[tag-tec]YouTube Video ID[/tag-tec],” the system creates an abstract image of copyrighted videos and compares that to similar images that are extracted from videos uploaded to YouTube.

While the filtering system began operating in test mode on Monday, the average YouTube user is unlikely to notice anything different, at least in the near future. That is because Google needs copyright owners to submit copies of their material to the Google database. “We need their cooperation, without a copy of the content, we don’t know who owns what.”

The flow of pirated material onto YouTube, the premier video sharing site, has been constant throughout its history despite several anti-piracy efforts YouTube has attempted. As a consequence, powerful media companies have balked at reaching licensing deals to distribute their content to YouTube.