Google has been telling the US Wall Street Journal that it in the middle of advanced testing of a home grown video filtering technology, at long last.
Google has prevaricated and delayed with CEO Eric Schmidt explaining just a month back that it was all a lot more complex than other people suggested and that Google and its errant child YouTube would soon have copyright filtering for video up and working.
MySpace and Microsoft’s Soapbox have both opted to proactively filter all uploaded content, using technology from Audible Magic, and keep it off the site. We would have thought that the requirement was to get the job done to stop legal actions from being followed through, not put in place a permanent system designed by Google engineers, plenty of time for that later.
Now it transpires that Time Warner and Disney will take part in a trial with the self imposed target of offering full availability for all content owners by the fall.
The story is that Audible Magic and other technologies are inadequate. The likely truth is that YouTube is at a pivotal point in its acceptance among web customers and it is almost inconceivable that it can lose its market lead to one of the other players, unless it suddenly makes YouTube less interesting by removing all of that lovely copyrighted content. Even a delay of a few months, and in the end it will have been around six months, will buy Google time to cement the YouTube brand and its web traffic lead, even to the point where some other rivals are denied survival.
This brinkmanship in our view is to ensure that the Viacom’s $1 billion legal action cannot even get heard, until after the copyrighted material is removed from the site, yet and to keep the copyrighted content on the site, legally, for as long as possible.
The tools will allow copyright owners to identify unauthorized clips, and then either remove them from YouTube themselves, or allow them to remain online and share in ad revenue with YouTube.