WebProNews

A group of major media and Internet companies on Thursday announced that they are setting up guidelines to deal with protecting copyrighted material.

Companies involved in setting up the guidelines include Walt Disney Co., Viacom, CBS, NBC Universal, News Corp., Microsoft, Veoh Networks, and Dailymotion. Media representatives who requested not to be quoted said Google had initially participated in discussions but later decided to withdraw from the coalition according to the AP.

James McQuivey, Forrester Research analyst, said that a copyright protection guideline deal could explain why Google announced a copyright protection plan. "Once an industry initiative is formed, Google will be forced to accept the common model rather than use its own solution as a competitive differentiator," McQuivey said.

"The pressure on Google to go along with this cooperative initiative will be intense, as the fate of existing lawsuits will likely hinge on Google's acceptance of the common solution."

The guidelines set up by the coalition require sites to block infringing content before it is posted on a site, while Google's technology would identify copyrighted content after it was posted on the site and then take action to remove it.

The new guidelines ask that Internet companies have filtering software in place by the end of 2007 and that it blocks all content that media companies say is infringing.