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A broad range of players in the Internet video industry, minus Google meet today in order to arrange a set of “collaborative principles” for Internet video. They hope this movement will help Internet video to continue to grow, while also protecting copyrighted material.

Headlining the group were CBS, NBC, Fox, Myspace, Disney, and Microsoft.

This conference is being planned because of the increased demand of companies to respect their copyrighted material. Viacom, as you may have known has a pending lawsuit against Internet video superstar YouTube, and this is no doubt, one of the major reasons of this United Nations-like gathering.

A recent study (read offline) shows that almost 35% of software (including operating systems) is pirated. This is just a flash in the pan when you start considering illegal mp3 downloads, which make up almost 65% of all music downloads.

I have no clue what these media giants think they are going to do to stop pirating, but I applaud them for trying. It’s become clear that Internet piracy will get worse before it gets better.

Bryan - EJ News

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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.

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As many of you know the online video website, YouTube, was the target of a stock buyout by Google to the tune of 1.6 billion dollars. You can stay up to date with this news by following the Google news trail about YouTube.

YouTube successfully beat the video sharing services of Yahoo and Google, attracting more users than both the Internet giants and naturally becoming a target for a takeover. Based on the news of last week, Google was successful after rumours of buyouts from both Yahoo and Microsoft. The big winners here are YouTube’s founders and investors, who received a ton of Google stock for their 18 months work on YouTube and now join the ranks of Internet made billionaires.

I’m not too clued in on the video sharing market but Ken McCarthy’s discussion of the takeover on his blog covers the main points as I see it and is well worth a read.

What I find so exciting about this story is the potential for huge wealth in such a short time. That’s a 1.6 billion dollar deal after only operating for 18 months and showing no profit. That is insane!

What this proves is provided you have the eyeballs - you can attract traffic in uber-huge quantities - you have the formula for wealth online. Yes a profitable business model is important but you don’t necessarily have to be currently making profit to win big. You can almost leave the monetization up to the future owners provided you have a sustainable formula for keeping the traffic coming - as crazy as that sounds.

The YouTube story is a rare case of success at this level but the point to be made is that the Internet is a special industry working with different rules and sometimes, like in this case, capable of operating at hyperspeed - making billionaires in a very short timeframe.

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