Speaking at two different conferences this week, Schmidt said that the search engine company is preparing to launch a new software tool, called "Claim Your Content," that will make it easy for copyright holders to report infringement on YouTube. Both YouTube and Google, which acquired the video-sharing site in October 2006 for $1.6 billion, have been strongly criticized for not doing more to weed out copyrighted shows.

In Las Vegas on Monday, Schmidt did a keynote Q&A session at the annual meeting of the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB), a group particularly concerned about the misuse of proprietary material on the Web in general and YouTube in particular. The next day, Schmidt addressed attendees of the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco.

Slow Development Efforts

YouTube's Head of Communications, Julie Supan, said that the software undergoing testing right now will give copyright holders greater ability to protect their content, but will not independently identify copyrighted material.

"The technology does not identify copyright material," Supan said, "because we can not distinguish between copyrighted material on YouTube that the owner wants on the site from material that is put up without the owners' permission."

"What we are testing," Supan went on to say, "is identification technology that will help content owners identify and locate their content on YouTube. This will facilitate their ability to 'claim their content' and leave it up for promotional purposes or, if they wish, seek to remove it from the site."

Negotiating Tactics

For months prior its sale to Google, YouTube said that it was working on a software solution to the piracy problem, but nothing emerged from YouTube's I.T. department. Broadcasters have argued that Google has been slow to implement its own solution because of the advertising revenues generated by YouTube visitors who use the site to watch network shows.

Google and YouTube have successfully worked out licensing agreements with several different media companies, but were unable to do so with Viacom, the nation's largest media company. Finally, in March 2007, Viacom ran out of patience and filed a copyright-infringement suit against Google and YouTube, asking for $1 billion in damages.

According to CNET.com, Schmidt told John Seigenthaler, a former reporter with NBC's Nightly News, and an audience of approximately 300 people at NAB that "[y]ou're either doing business with them or being sued by them ... we chose the former, but ended up the latter."

At the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco the next day, Schmidt agreed with a suggestion that Viacom's lawsuit was essentially a negotiating tactic in the ongoing discussions between the two companies over the appropriate licensing fees for Viacom's content.