• The Wall Street Journal, Tuesday, June 12, 2007 10:31 AM

Timing is everything: on the same day media executives accused Google of stalling on a YouTube copyright fingerprinting technology, the Web giant says it will have a new system operational in about a month. Frankly, we've heard that before, but this time, YouTube has test partners to back up its claims. These include Time Warner Inc. and Walt Disney Co., which, among others, have been anxiously awaiting a fingerprinting technology to help further partnership negotiations with YouTube.

YouTube Partner Development Director Chris Maxcy says the company is building an in-house video-fingerprinting technology because existing offerings from providers like Audible Magic--which Google currently usesaren't good enough. Read: that's Google's excuse for taking so long to address the video unit's core issue. And it's still not ready--YouTube CEO Chad Hurley said the product would go to market this fall.

The company's begrudging acceptance of copyright filtering technology is evidence that Google can't be happy with the way its YouTube acquisition has turned out so far. The Web giant figured that the sheer volume of users on YouTube coupled with its ability to monetize searchable content would be currency enough to strike deals with copyright owners. Instead, Google is looking at a new lawsuit just about every week.

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