Anti-piracy system could hurt YouTube

"We're going to probably see a lot of instances like that," said Michael McGuire, a technology analyst for Gartner Inc. "It's going to be a constant game of cat and mouse."

YouTube did not provide further details on the technology, which it expects to roll out by the end of the year.

Some analysts doubt the screening technology will be foolproof. For example, detecting someone singing a copyright song on a homemade video could be difficult because the sound would not exactly match the original recording.

"It's impossible to be completely effective," said Josh Bernoff, a digital video analyst with Forrester Research. "The devil's in the details."

YouTube's final product could resemble a system developed by Audible Magic Inc., which has compiled electronic fingerprints for more than 4 million recordings to compare to content posted on iMesh, an online file-sharing application.

Another video-sharing site, Guba LLC, which hosts user-generated videos as well as Hollywood movies that can be streamed or downloaded for a fee, uses a different content filtering technology dubbed "Johnny" that has been endorsed by major film studios.

The application tracks the transition of images in a video, like a series of snapshots, to build a signature used as a basis for comparison.

Banned content can be matched against Guba's video database and flagged, regardless of whether its format, resolution or file size are different than the original, said Bart Myers, Guba's senior vice president of product development.

"The beauty of Johnny is that Johnny doesn't care," he said.

The company claims the technology is more than 90 percent accurate with video clips that exceed three minutes. But the shorter the clip, the harder it is to spot a match.

Some sites such as Microsoft Corp.'s video-sharing hub Soapbox don't use any technology to filter what gets uploaded. But that appears to be changing.

In a statement, Rob Bennett, general manager of MSN's entertainment and video services unit, said the company is developing technologies to protect content owners.

Other sites fgure to follow.

"We expect that all of our partners in this space are going to implement state-of-the-art content-filtering technology," said Michael Nash, a senior vice president at Warner Music Group.

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