Google Bares Tool to Hunt & Zap Copyrighted Videos

Google yesterday unveiled new technology to seek out copyright-protected material on its YouTube site, which the company hopes will head off Viacom's $1 billion lawsuit. The software scans videos, breaks them down into data points and analyzes them so that any matching versions can be flagged and removed "in a matter of minutes," said a YouTube exec.

The problem: In order to determine which videos violate copyright, there first has to be a collection of protected videos to match against new ones. That means thousands of copyright-protected films will have to be uploaded to a comparison database. "It's going to be a lot of work," concedes an attorney. (More Google stories.)