Myspace hands out anti-piracy tool to content owners

New York (NY) - While Google continues to give somewhat fuzzy timelines about when it will rollout video piracy prevention mechanisms for YouTube, News Corp’s Myspace today announced that it is going to make available to content owners a tool that would help the social networking site automatically weed out videos that have been posted without the media company’s consent.

Myspace has teamed up with audio tech specialist Audible Magic to implement a video screening process that can identify if a submitted file has a specific "audio fingerprint" that copyright owners can embed into their videos, reports the Associated Press.

A recent piracy sting was initiated last week by Viacom, which ordered YouTube to pull over 100,000 videos that infringed on its copyrights. Myspace has not been under as much fire as YouTube, meaning today’s move is likely more of a preemptive measure.

YouTube was supposed to implement a strong anti-piracy system by the end of 2006, but it failed to do so. Google says it is still working on getting the technology put together, leaving some content owners disgruntled with the video sharing platform.

"YouTube needs to prove that it will implement its filtering technology across its online platform. It’s proven it can do it when it wants to. The question is whether they have the will," NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker was quoted as saying, even after the company came to an agreement with the site to stream videos it submits to YouTube directly.