• The Wall Street Journal, Thursday, October 18, 2007 10:45 AM

A group of major traditional and Web media companies today entered into a pact to fight rampant copyright violation on the Internet. The consortium, which includes Microsoft, NBC Universal, News Corp., Viacom, Walt Disney Co. and the video sharing company Dailymotion, agreed to a set of guidelines protecting copyright holders.

Conspicuous by their absence were both Google and its video-sharing site, YouTube, which pretty much started and is mostly responsible for the copyright mess. Google was involved in discussions about joining the initiative, but has not yet done so.

Among other things, they all agreed to use digital fingerprinting technology to eliminate copyrighted videos before they become public. Incidentally, Google has also jumped on that bandwagon, announcing a new copyright detection technology earlier this week. However, the company said its technology cannot yet prevent infringing content from being posted initially, but can pull flagged content "in a matter of a few minutes."

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