• CNET News.com, Monday, June 11, 2007 11:16 AM

The agitation is mounting among Hollywood executives with respect to YouTube's perennially "still-coming" content filtering system. It's now been two months since Google CEO Eric Schmidt quelled Hollywood fears over the forthcoming program, which he said the company is close to enacting.

But CNET says it's not just the "hold on, it's coming" thing that has media executives angry, it's the "no-shows at meetings and canceled test programs" that lead them to believe Google might be stalling. Either it's awaiting a decisive ruling in the Viacom copyright infringement case, or maybe the search giant thinks it can strike a few significant deals before putting the squeeze on illegally uploaded content.

Meanwhile, lesser sites like YouTube-Guba, Dailymotion.com, Microsoft's Soapbox have deployed copyright-filtering technologies. Legal groups like the National Legal and Policy Center say Google's claim that it can't block copyrighted videos is dubious at best--especially when you consider that the cornerstone of Google's Viacom case is the DMCA, which says social media sites only have to take down copyrighted content when asked.

"Clearly, this is not a resource constraint. This is a function of will," Darcy Antonellis, senior vice president of worldwide anti-piracy operations for Warner Bros said of YouTube's promises. "We are making very clear (to YouTube) what has to be done...and it has got to move along at a much faster pace."

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