Media giants reject YouTube’s copyright filter


22 Oct 2007

A group of old and new media organisations including Viacom, Microsoft and MySpace, have gathered together in an attempt to establish an industry standard for protecting copyright content on the web.

The group made this announcement two days after Google finally introduced its long-awaited content filtering tool to prevent copyrighted material from being posted by its users on YouTube.

Viacom’s president and CEO, Phillipe Dauman, said at a conference last week that the release date for Google’s filtering tool was “interesting” in light of the fact that the company knew about the development of its principles for a copyright protection standard.

Dauman said at the conference that Google was a high-quality company with smart people and it can get things done quickly if it wants to. But in his opinion Google hadn’t wanted to until this point.

The group, which also includes NBC, CBS and Disney, said its aim is to develop a set of guidelines which will “enable the continued growth and development of user-generated content online and respect the intellectual property of content owners”.

Chris DeWolfe, CEO and co-founder of MySpace said: “As part of one of the world’s largest media companies and with original content of our own, we’re vigilant about respecting and protecting copyrights.

“Internally, we’ve developed an industry-leading suite of copyright protections for content owners and we’re thrilled to align forces with the world’s top media and internet companies to develop best practices.”

One of the group members, NBC, has also quietly dropped its content from YouTube by pulling its official YouTube channel which was only launched last June.

NBC is developing its own online portal which will be going into private beta later this month with shows such as Heroes, My Name is Earl, and The Office.

By Marie Boran