Viacom calls Google's new filtering system 'Inadequate'

The US media conglomerate Viacom Inc., which currently has a $1 billion lawsuit against Google, expressed its dissatisfaction over a filtering system recently launched by the search giant, and showed its unwillingness to drop the lawsuit against Google or its YouTube property.

Viacom, the owner of MTV Networks, Paramount Pictures and Comedy Central, said it is not satisfied with the anti-piracy technology that has been implemented on YouTube to detect copyright-violating submissions on the hugely popular video sharing site.

Calling Google's new filtering software ‘inadequate’, Philippe Dauman, Viacom President and Chief Executive Officer said at the Web 2.0 Summit event in San Francisco that Google has not done enough to prevent content from being illegally uploaded to YouTube, a platform that millions of users across the world use to host as well as watch video content.

In March, the New York-based entertainment giant Viacom Media filed a suit with the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleging Google's San Bruno-based video-sharing site YouTube knowingly infringed Viacom copyrights "on a huge scale."

In its lawsuit, Viacom claimed unauthorized display of over 160,000 video clips picked collectively from MTV, Comedy Central, and Nickelodeon by YouTube. Besides claiming "massive intentional copyright infringement" of its properties Viacom demanded for an injunction preventing Google and YouTube from further copyright infringement. Viacom also seeks more than US $1 billion in damages and an injunction against further violations against YouTube and its parent company Google Inc.

However, in May, Google said that it has not infringed on the rights of the media company and denied virtually all the claims Viacom made in its lawsuit against Google. In its response to the lawsuit, filed Monday in Federal District Court in Manhattan, Google contended that YouTube’s activities are legal.

This week, Google launched a new filtering system for its subsidiary YouTube that the search engine company claims would effectively give people, who have copyrights for their videos and are using YouTube to showcase themselves, the ability to block or display content on their page.

The Google YouTube Video Identification technology basically has an automated system that identifies videos as users upload them, and then crosschecks the uploaded content with an existing database of copyrighted material the company has.

But, Dauman said Google’s Video Identification technology falls short of what is actually required. "I don't think we're quite there," he said. "Google is a very high-quality company with a lot of very smart people. They can do things when they want to. They haven't wanted to until this point. They have a lot of tools, but they're not perfect."

Meanwhile, a group of digital media majors on Thursday issued a set of guidelines on copyright protection. The group includes Viacom, Walt Disney, Microsoft, News Corp's Fox and MySpace units, and General Electric's NBC Universal, but lacks the participation of Google, AOL, Yahoo and Facebook, the leading providers of online user generated content.

The coalition yesterday has agreed to the use of content identification technology to filter pirated content circulating online, and to block the unauthorized videos and other material before it becomes widely available.