Philip Beck said that the company hoped to have its system in
place by September or later in the autumn. Beck told a New York
judge of the implementation timetable as part of a lawsuit being
taken against it by content owners.
Film and television company Viacom, music publisher Bourne and
the English Premier League are suing YouTube and their cases have
been combined. Beck's revelation came as part of that hearing
before Judge Louis Stanton.
YouTube allows users to view and to post videos online for free.
Though designed for content users have produced themselves, it has
been widely used to post and view copyrighted material without
owners' permission.
YouTube claims that it is not liable for infringing activity
because it qualifies for 'safe harbor' under the US Digital
Millennium Copyright Act. This protects companies such as internet
service providers from liability for the content that travels on
their networks.
YouTube has long promised a filtering technology that it claimed
would actively filter out infringing material, but this is the
first time a firm timetable has been released.
Beck said that the technology Google and YouTube were working on
was as sophisticated as the fingerprint recognition technology used
by the FBI. He said that the company hoped to have the technology
operational "hopefully by September".
In the system, content owners would give YouTube a 'digital
fingerprint' which would be used to identify videos in its system
that infringed copyrights. He said that videos would be removed
within a minute of posting.
Beck's timetable may be optimistic, though. A YouTube
spokesperson told news service IDG that "it's difficult to forecast
specific launch dates".
The DMCA says that operators can qualify for 'safe harbor' if
they immediately remove offending material once they are notified
about it, but content owners such as Viacom have argued that
notifying the company about every single posted video is
impractical.
