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Compounding YouTube's recent rows with copyright holders, YouTube's biggest backdoor competitor, MySpace, announced a pilot program developed with Audible Magic to block copyrighted video from being posited in the community.
Now Showing: Protected Videos At MySpace
That leaves MySpace severely beating YouTube to the punch it promised to throw last spring. Some sort of copyright protection technology has been promised since then.

MySpace already licenses audio fingerprinting technology from Audible. The new addition of video fingerprinting makes MySpace the largest video site offer copyright owners that protection.

"MySpace is dedicated to ensuring that content owners, whether large or small, can both promote and protect their content in our community,” said Chris DeWolfe, CEO and co-founder of MySpace. “For MySpace, video filtering is about protecting artists and the work they create.”

In addition, MySpace says it has developed content takedown tool intended to make it easier and more efficient for copyright owners to request removal of any user-posted content they claim is unauthorized. How they control for potential abuse, though, is not something the company addressed.

Media powerhouses like Universal Music Group, NBC/Universal, and Fox are all participating in the pilot program, the company said. Some sort of copyright protection has been a demand from major networks since online video began gaining in popularity. Lack of protection has been considered one of the largest obstacles to networks utilizing the Web to its full potential.

And any site that offers that protection is going to have a better chance of thriving in the online video world, as illustrated by a statement by Audible Magic CEO Vance Ikezoye. " With the explosive growth and popularity of MySpace, the recognition and filtering of copyrights will play an important role in its ongoing success."

And YouTube, er, Google, may need to remember that.

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