It was bound to happen. Given the recent Viacom lawsuit and other hullabaloo surrounding YouTube and the proliferation of copyrighted videos, it was only a matter of time before Google began to work on a way to recognize and automatically eliminate illegal content.

According to the report, by September, "Google will have 'up, running, and effective' a new content-fingerprinting technology for YouTube that would resolve the entire copyright issue at the core of the Viacom copyright infringement lawsuit, attorney Philip Beck told the judge overseeing the case in New York on Friday."

It's mildly amusing that both parties are taking a kind of "I don't know exactly what's going on" approach. In the article, Viacom acknowledged that "it did not grasp--and had no feasible way of finding out--just how many of its copyrighted clips are stored within YouTube member's private areas, which are not accessible to the general public." Meanwhile, Google's defense all along was that they have no way of knowing who uploads what at any given moment, but as soon as they're notified about a particular copyrighted clip, they remove it. Expect the next problem to be that the new software doesn't yet work for the iPhone, Helio handsets, and other devices capable of streaming YouTube videos.

Google Lawyer: Copyright Protection For YouTube Video Almost Ready [MediaPost]