Is Google planning YouTube anti-piracy tool for September ?

Summary: During a hearing, an attorney from Google has stated that the company would introduce in September an anti-piracy too. The video recognition technology would allow copyright owners to provide a digital fingerprint that would trigger a block from YouTube whenever someone tries to upload a copyright video without permission.

Source: InfoWorld

First paragraphs:

Google aims to deliver in September a long-awaited and much-promised technology to combat piracy in its YouTube video sharing site.

During a hearing Friday in the copyright-infringement lawsuit that Viacom filed against Google, a Google attorney told the judge Google was working "very intensely" on a video recognition technology, the AP reported.

The technology will be as sophisticated as fingerprint technology used by the FBI, and Google plans to roll it out in the fall, "hopefully in September," attorney Philip S. Beck of Barlit Beck Herman Palenchar & Scott told U.S. District Judge Louis L. Stanton, according to the AP. Fall runs from late September to late December.

Viacom sued Google in March in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleging copyright infringement from YouTube and seeking $1 billion in damages.

The video recognition technology will allow copyright owners to provide a digital fingerprint that within a minute or two will trigger a block from YouTube whenever someone tries to upload a copyright video without permission, the AP reported.

However, contacted by IDG News Service, a YouTube spokesman put some caveats around the attorney’s stated timeline for implementing the technology.

"We hope to have the testing completed and technology available by some time in the fall, but this is one of the most technologically complicated tasks that we have ever undertaken, and as always with cutting-edge technologies, it’s difficult to forecast specific launch dates," he said.

Google is collaborating with "some of the major media companies" in experiments with video-identification tools and is "excited" about the progress so far, the YouTube spokesman said.

Google officials have acknowledged that the company is working on a system to deal with copyright videos uploaded to YouTube without permission, a nagging problem that has earned Google many enemies among TV and movie companies.

Read the full article at InfoWorld