• The Guardian (UK), Monday, November 2, 2009 1:46 PM

Hoping to finally turn a profit on YouTube, Google is appealing to music and film footage rights owners to make ad revenue from their content rather than remove it from the video-sharing site for breach of copyright. The search giant has been selling a fingerprinting system for rights holders that means YouTube can identify their material even when it has been altered and made part of user-generated content such as wedding videos or satirical clips.

First developed two years ago, the ContentID system is finally attracting record labels, TV producers and sports rights owners with the promise of ad dollars, according to the Guardian. To achieve its goal, Google's computers are comparing all the material uploaded to YouTube -- around 20 hours every minute -- against "ID files" from a 100,000-hour library of reference material from the rights holders.

Read the whole story at The Guardian (UK) »