• The New York Times, Monday, February 19, 2007 12:15 PM

Media companies have a new friend in arms in their fight against user-generated content sites like Google's YouTube. Audible Magic, a maker of content-recognition software that could identify even the blurriest piece of copyrighted material, is now open for business. Last week, it signed an agreement with News Corporation's MySpace to identify copyrighted material on its pages.

YouTube publicly and repeatedly claimed it would adopt such a technology by the end of last year. Six weeks after the passing of that deadline, YouTube doesn't appear any closer to fulfilling its promise, angering Viacom, which recently ordered all of its content off the site. YouTube angered it further by saying it would only deploy content-filtering technology for its partners. In a statement, YouTube implied that identifying copyrighted video clips required media firms' cooperation. Sure, but not necessarily a business relationship.

Audible Magic and others have developed a system independent of big media's cooperation. Using a technique called "digital fingerprinting," the company checks its vast databases containing digital representations of songs, movies and TV shows. When new files are being uploaded, the system checks these databases before allowing or blocking them. Critics of the service say there are too many loopholes, and that it would be too difficult (and expensive) to upload the vast amount of content released daily into such a database.

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