Media, Web Companies Set Copyright Rules

Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman smiles as he speaks at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco, Thursday, Oct. 18, 2007. Media companies Walt Disney Co., Viacom Inc., CBS Corp., NBC Universal and News Corp. joined Internet companies Microsoft Corp., MySpace, Veoh Networks and Dailymotion to issue the guidelines, which would require sites to use filtering technology to block copyrighted clips from being posted without permission. Dauman said Thursday he was surprised when Google's announcement of new filtering technology came out just days before the coalition announced its guidelines. (AP Photo/Paul Sakuma) (Paul Sakuma - AP)

In contrast, Thursday's guidelines require that sites use technology to block offending clips before they are posted online.

The guidelines also require Web sites to identify Web sites that repeatedly try to upload unauthorized content and either block those sites or remove links to them.

Media representatives who asked not to be quoted said that Google had initially participated in discussions, but later decided not to participate in the coalition.

YouTube issued a statement Thursday that reopened the door for cooperation.

"We appreciate ideas from the various media companies on effective content identification technologies," Jeremy Doig, YouTube director of engineering, said. "We're glad that they recognize the need to cooperate on these issues, and we'll keep working with them to refine our industry-leading tools."

Viacom chief executive Philippe Dauman said Thursday he was surprised when Google's announcement of new filtering technology came out just days before the coalition announced its guidelines.

"They knew about this announcement today," Dauman said at a Web conference in San Francisco

For his part, Dauman said he kept a "completely open mind" when he met one year ago with Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

"They talked then about having a filtering system," Dauman said. "They can do things very quickly when they want to.... I guess they haven't wanted to."

Despite Viacom's pending $1 billion lawsuit against Google, Dauman predicted that "at some point in the future we'll work with Google."

The new guidelines require Internet companies to have in place by the end of 2007 filtering software that blocks all content media companies flag as being unauthorized.

The guidelines also require that user-generated video sites also keep their filtering technology up to date, and they call for cooperation between media and Web companies to allow "wholly original" user-generated videos to be posted and to accommodate "fair use" of copyrighted material as allowed under law.

The guidelines do not specify how liberally or conservatively the term "fair use" will be defined. Fair use provisions of the U.S. copyright act allow segments of copyrighted works to be used for purposes of parody or satire or in reviews and other limited circumstances.

_ AP Business Writer Rachel Konrad contributed to this article from San Francisco.

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On the Net:

Full text of the User Generated Content Principles: http://www.ugcprinciples.com/