Even though buying YouTube was a good move for Google, the copyright issue was from the start an issue. Google had numerous lawsuits regarding copyrighted material posted on YouTube. And even though they tried to manage it by making deals with big media corporations, piracy is still a big problem.

It seems that the new lawsuit with Viacom has put some pressure on Google, as they declared the work is very intense on finishing their video recognition technology “hopefully in September”.

“We hope to have the testing completed and technology available by some time in the fall, but this is one of the most technologically complicated tasks that we have ever undertaken, and as always with cutting-edge technologies, it’s difficult to forecast specific launch dates,”

The idea behind the technology in development by Google, is that copyright owners will provide a digital fingerprint that will be checked on YouTube after a movie is uploaded. It all sounds simple but the technology used is quite complex, Google representatives declaring it’s one of the most challenging technical problems they were confronted with.

For now the developers say they are happy with the progress and that tests are underway with big copyright owners in the media industry. If the system is ready this fall it could save Google a lot of money and trouble in the near future.