Only yesterday we saw Google bring their YouTube online anti-piracy tool to beta to help combat the illegal posting of copyrighted videos. Today an announcement by a group of technology and media companies suddenly sheds some light on the significance of Google rolling out the service when they did.

A group consisting of Fox, CBS, NBC Universal, Walt Disney, MySpace, Viacom, and Microsoft (note the absence of Google) has announced a copyright protection agreement for rules that they …

Today Google has announced the beta launch of YouTube Video Identification, a new antipiracy tool that we heard about in July during a copyright infringement lawsuit with Viacom. The new system is a result of a number of angry video owners, Viacom being one of the angriest, complaining that YouTube was supporting users uploading and sharing illegally copied video content.

The new system will use a “fingerprinting” type of technology which provides a unique identification to each video. With Video Identification users will still be able to upload any videos they would like and have the instantly appear on the site as before, but once uploaded YouTube will then be comparing the uploaded content to legitimate videos provided by the owners. When matching videos are found the owner’s can choose to automatically have the video removed, promoted or in true Google form they can even take advantage of the uploaded content and monetize the video for copyright holders who chooses to license their videos.

Google may have an antipiracy tool for the YouTube video sharing site as soon as September according to a statement Friday by an attorney for Google. During a hearing in the copyright infringement lawsuit filed by Viacom against Google last March a Google attorney stated that they are currently working on some type of video recognition technology.

The new technology should be able to create a unique identification on each video, similar to the uniqueness of a fingerprint, that owners of the videos can place on their …

Friday YouTube and their new parent company Google were hit with another copyright infringement lawsuit, this time from England’s top soccer league and a US music publisher.

The Premier League and Bourne Co. issued the lawsuit citing that not only does YouTube have their copyrighted content on the video sharing website, but that they are encouraging people to view the footage on the website and subsequently are “knowingly” misappropriating the two companies intellectual property. By this, according to the lawsuit, the operators of YouTube are exploiting the …

Two days ago Viacom dropped a $1 billion lawsuit on Google and YouTube stating that the video sharing giant had violated copyright laws by hosting videos created by some of Viacom’s programming brand.

In response, attorneys for Google feel that they have strong legal protections under current copyright law, according to Reuters. The legal team feels they have a very strong defense due to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

“Here there is a law which is specifically designed to give Web hosts such as us, …

Last month Viacom had asked YouTube to remove over 100k video clips from its website that Viacom stated violated copyrights, and then later that month Viacom made a deal with Joost to provide video content for their website. Today Viacom has issues a lawsuit against YouTube and its parent company Google for copyright infringement claiming 1 billion dollars in damages.

Viacom is claiming that YouTube has over 160,000 unauthorized video clips of Viacom’s content on their website which collectively has been viewed more than 1.5 billion times. Viacom is …