The government of Pakistan has today ordered all local internet providers to block access to Google’s YouTube video sharing site “until further notice” due to offensive content. According to officials, the YouTube website contains cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammad which angered a large number of Muslims.

The same cartoons were published earlier in a Danish newspaper which led to protests, rioting and eventually more than 50 deaths in countries including Pakistan. Internet surfers in Pakistan trying to access the YouTube site were met with a simple message saying the site was unavailable, with the local ISP’s unable to restore access despite upset users.

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 …

EMI Music has finally fallen in line and taken a big swig of the YouTube/Google kool-aid along with peers Sony BMG, Universal, and Warner by making an agreement with the mammoth video sharing site to show “approved” EMI content. EMI may have ben the last of the “big 4″ to make a deal with YouTube since they were recently consumed with being the first to launch a DRM-free music catalog with Apple.

With the agreement, EMI is able to get compensated for it’s videos that are shown …

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 …

Viacom will become a major content provider to the Joost global broadband television service, according to an announcement on Tuesday. This marks the first big licensing deal for Joost.

As a partner, Viacom will offer television shows and movies from its MTV Networks, BET Networks and Paramount Pictures divisions. Using Joost, consumers can watch Viacom content on their computers for free.

Viacom made headlines a mere two weeks ago after the media company pulled clips from Google’s YouTube online video sharing service due to copyright concerns.

Joost provides advanced television viewing features …

20th Century Fox has served YouTube with a subpoena over entire episodes of “24″ and “The Simpsons” which were uploaded to the site. Fox wants to know who uploaded the video to the video site. YouTube is owned by Google who may have set aside money for the legal defense of YouTube over copyrighted material that makes its way to the site.

Fox is upset because the “24″ episodes were uploaded to YouTube and another site, …

What does 1.65 billion dollars buy you these days? Well, if you are Google it buys you a popular free video sharing web site and a fair share of controversy.

YouTube, which lets users upload, view, and share video clips was founded in February 2005 by three early employees of PayPal. YouTube has made headlines recently due to the scuttlebutt concerning copyright violations. Most videos posted on YouTube are original, but the site also features a certain amount of copyrighted material. This problem has caused some pundits to predict the startup …