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Earlier today YouTube announced the arrival of their long-awaited anti-piracy software. This software has been in development for some time, no doubt due to the increasing concern that YouTube was turning a blind eye to video copyright infringement. This all changed when media colossus Viacom slapped YouTube with a one billion dollar lawsuit.

To find and remove copyrighted clips, YouTube already uses filtering tools developed by Los Gatos-based Audible Magic Corp. - however, due to several pending lawsuits, they decided to develop their own proprietary software to sniff out Internet pirates. This software was released today and may spell the end for video pirating, at least as far as YouTube is concerned.

As you may have heard, this software is about 6 months overdue. Part of the “remedy” for the Viacom lawsuit, it was supposed to be released months ago.

“YouTube has been working with Google engineers ever since to develop the tools needed to flag copyrighted video,” said David King, a YouTube product manager. “It has taken some extra time to get it right.”

Not everyone is optimistic about the release of YouTube’s new filtering technology.

Louis Solomon, a lawyer representing an English soccer league and music publisher Bourne Co; a company with yet another copyright infringement case against YouTube, criticized the new filtering system as “wholly inadequate.”

“It does nothing about the past and won’t be enough to protect the future,” Solomon said.

YouTube replies that whatever they do to stop users from publishing copyrighted content would be more effective if they received help from the copyright owners. King claims that it is sometimes difficult to gage whether or not a video is legally or illegally posted to the site, because some publishers post copyrighted content on YouTube for promotional purposes.

Whichever side you are on, I can assure you of one thing… the war isn’t over.