As leading content owners like Viacom move towards new start ups like Joost to host their videos, Google (News - Alert) owned YouTube is slowly waking up to the reality that it cannot let unauthorized video sharing on its website go unmonitored. After downplaying the demands from many of its content providers for years, Google is finally coming up with a mechanism to check unauthorized video hosting on its website.

According to sources, Google will use technology from Los Gatos-based Audible Magic to prevent the illegal sharing of copyrighted materials. Audible magic includes iMesh, a peer-to-peer music-sharing site, the PlayLouder MSP music service, and Grouper, a video-sharing site owned by Sony. Audible Magic works by comparing the audio fingerprint of a video to a large database of copyrighted material.

Widespread piracy is a major issue for video sharing websites and content owners have been up in arms as to how to protect their copyrighted materials. YouTube is not the only site that has received piracy complaints. Websites like Dailymotion.com in France or Peekvids.com in Denmark offer pirated, full length feature films and TV episodes to their audience. YouTube at least places a 10 minute limit on the uploaded video clips!

While YouTube fears losing its leadership in the online video sharing arena by filtering the videos, the company is constantly chased by content owners wanting it to enact stricter rules and stop piracy.

This is not the first time Google has proposed to stop piracy. It first talked about using anti-piracy mechanism in last September, but nothing ever materialized. The piracy allegedly continued even as the Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt was busy negotiating licensing deals with major content owners.

Leading content providers view this move by Google to filter the videos as a means for the Internet behemoth to leverage its negotiations. Pressure on Google has mounted in the last few months as Viacom demanded YouTube to remove more than 100,000 videos from the company web site. This was a major setback for YouTube, as Viacom’s content included popular serials like SpongeBob Squarepants. Other content owners like NBC Universal and News Corp. also have requested YouTube to remove their videos from the website.

YouTube is currently sandwiched between two types of content providers. On the one hand, there are websites like Joost which host only legal videos and which are strongly backed by the content owners like Viacom. On the other hand, there are countless video sharing and P2P networks that simply let users upload and share anything they want, without the slightest worry about the copyright issues. If Google filters its videos, YouTube will surely loose some of its ardent fans. On the other hand, Google cannot let piracy go unchecked on YouTube as content owners are getting more vociferous every passing day.

Also, many industry leaders are still skeptical about YouTube’s promise to filter videos on its website. Considering the technical gaps that still exist in identifying illegal video uploads, one can see why content owners are apprehensive.

But this is at least a start!

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Raju Shanbhag is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To see more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.