Hoping to appease angry movie and television companies, online video leader YouTube finally launches its long-awaited technology for automatically removing copyrighted clips. The question is, will this work?

YouTube parent Google announced that the long-awaited technology to automatically (or almost automatically) remove copyrighted clips is finally here. YouTube Video Identification, the filtering tool designed so owners of copyrighted video can block their material from appearing on YouTube, comes in the midst of a $1 billion copyright suit filed by Viacom against the online video leader for copyright infringement.

Here’s how it works:

·         Copyright holders must provide copies of their content to YouTube to be included in a reference database, which then generates identification files by which uploaded videos are matched.

·         When a user uploads a video onto YouTube, the system matches it with a database of visual abstractions of the copyrighted material that has been provided by content owners.

·         If there is a match, the system will either block it, post it, or – depending upon the policy specified by the content owner – put ads on it, with the revenue being shared with the content owner.

·         If the copyright owner wants pirated copies to be blocked and the system finds a match, the pirated video may be posted, but only for a few minutes and then the system will remove it.

YouTube executives, crowing that it is the first image-recognition technology implemented on any large scale, claim that Video Identification goes above and beyond our legal responsibilities. They dismissed notions that movie studios won't want to have to provide all their new productions to YouTube. They added that Time Warner, Disney and CBS – three of nine organizations involved in testing the system – are pleased with the system.

So, is everyone happy? Not really.

Fair use advocates are saying that this tool will likely” restrict the flow of legal content over the Internet and raise the bar for…every entity that serves as a conduit for copyrighted works.”

The individual who first filed a copyright lawsuit against YouTube complained that Google, not the content owners, should have the burden of making sure that the material being posted is owned by the poster.

A lawyer in one of the law firms representing plaintiffs in a class-action suit filed against YouTube claimed that all you need is video fingerprinting and a clearinghouse, not the entire copy of the copyrighted content.

The Computer and Communications Industry Association and a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, wondered if the YouTube system would be able to separate use of copyrighted video that is allowed under fair use exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, including uses of short excerpts and parody.

Studios grumbled that while other sites like MySpace have already been using copyright filtering technology and even human editors, Google took so long to provide such copyright protections. To which David King, YouTube product manager, replied, "Building a system like this is extremely complex," said King. "This is actually a project that Google had been working on for a number of years already and then when the (YouTube) acquisition went through we ramped it up as a priority. It literally has taken until now to get the technology right."

And most important, Viacom insisted that a filtering system would not mean the end of its lawsuit because the company is owed damages for the clips that have already been pirated and posted on YouTube.

The verdict’s not in for Viacom’s lawsuit. Neither is it for YouTube’s new anti-piracy tool.