News Corp. beat Google to the punch. While Google's YouTube has been promising a filtering system for copyrighted video, MySpace announced a new program that should automatically remove copyrighted
material.
MySpace said it would weed out content belonging to Universal Music Group (as part of a settlement of an earlier lawsuit) and NBC Universal.
Crucially, the
move signals that music labels, TV and movie companies may be taking the upper hand in the debate over user-generated content sites and media firms' intellectual property. Ever since it acquired
YouTube in November, Google has been trying to use YouTube's massive, loyal user base, as well as its own enormous market capitalization, as leverage in negotiating with copyright holders.
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