Google’s at it again – after registering a whole slew of domains, the company has announced a fresh effort to keep copyrighted content off YouTube. Dubbed “Claim Your Content,” the program may be up and running soon.
How soon? With over 26 new domain names in his company’s possession, Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, said, “We are very close to turning this on,” according to a CNET article.
Claim Your Content will (in theory) automatically flag copyrighted content so that it can be removed. And Claim Your Content will also (in theory) protect Google from a lot of lawsuits. Schmidt even took a moment to specifically address DMCA-related issues during Google’s 2007 Earnings Call.
“It is very much compliant with the DMCA,” he assured listeners, “and we believe we will address many of the operational complaints people are making about the workload that the DMCA has put on them. So we’re trying to make that work, and we think it addresses the vast majority of all those complaints.”
As for further details about Claim Your Content – such as how it will work – Schmidt (and Google in general) has been less forthcoming. In response to a question about how content owners will prove their ownership, the CEO only said that “there is a mechanism where they work with us to show that, and again these tools are just beginning and over the next year, those mechanisms will get better and better.”
Still, this appears to be Google’s strongest effort yet to keep copyrighted content off YouTube. Only time will tell if it will work.
