• The Wall Street Journal, Thursday, August 9, 2007 11 AM

"Hasher"--a new breed of professionals (yes, legally) employed to scour online video sites for copyrighted content and report their findings back to big media firms. Agencies like 8-year-old startup BayTSP have more than 20 video analysts who do this all day, alerting YouTube to take down content belonging to clients like Viacom, per the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Companies like BayTSP have become "key players" in the legal battle between Viacom and YouTube that may well determine the future of how copyrights are handled on the Internet. In one instance, it takes two hours for YouTube to process a request to remove a piece of Viacom content.

BayTSP is the company the media giant used to remove more than 100,000 clips on the day Viacom filed the landmark $1 billion lawsuit against the Google video site. Viacom pays the copyright removal agency more than $100K per month to file take-down notices to YouTube and other video sites. BayTSP says it sends out more than 1 million take-down notices per month, charging individual clients as much as $500K.

Read the whole story at The Wall Street Journal »