Techniques are now being tested that allow copyright holders to detect unauthorized uploads to sites like YouTube by detecting their unique video fingerprints. This will allow the copyright holders to automatically detect and demand removal by the site, according to the Wall Street Journal on Monday.

Each day, hundreds of thousands of video clips are uploaded to YouTube. Some are videos made the by the person who uploaded, but some are clips of copyrighted material owned by another entity.

In order to detect these clips, a digital fingerprinting technology is being devised that allows the clip to be identified from just a few seconds of the audio and video.

However, the issue of how these filters are used is complicated by legal issues. Google wants to retain its "Safe Harbor" provision defined in the DMCA and has resisted acvively blocking uploads based on filters. Sites that have too much actual knowledge or control of infringing content can lose that DMCA protection. "What these filters do is potentially create more knowledge, more awareness of what's going on," says Fred von Lohmann, senior intellectual-property attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco. "There is some residual risk that you could lose the safe-harbor protections if you have too much of that kind of knowledge."

As a result Google is working with content partners, partners they seek to do business with, on an alternative, compromise arrangement. Google will only help identify unauthorized content, but the copyright holder has to take the action to request removal.

One of the leaders in the fingerprinting technology is Audible Magic. "Audible Magic Chief Executive Vance Ikezoye says his company's fingerprinting technology, whose users include MySpace Video, Sony Corp.'s Grouper, Break.com and GoFish Corp., is more than 99% accurate when it's used to examine a clip where the image and audio quality aren't degraded. Audible Magic's fingerprinting, originally designed for use with music, looks primarily at the audio tracks and requires a TV or film clip to be about 20 to 30 seconds long minimum to reliably analyze it. The company says it is testing technology that also examines the video component of the clips," The WSJ reported.

Ultimately, pirates could find workarounds, but the technology and tests conducted so far appear to offer both Google's YouTube and the studios a better framework in which to work together.