In the wake of a $1.65 billion acquisition, Google is looking to exclude pirated content from YouTube in order to transform the video sharing hotspot into a safe heaven for advertising. The main efforts of the mountain View Company regarding the copyrighted materials hosted on YouTube is to buy the support of the owner with advertising revenue. CBS Corp, Warner Music Group, Vivendi's Universal Music Group and Sony BMG Music Entertainment have all signed licensing agreements with YouTube. But there are those, and Universal Music is an illustrative example that some are bound to be more difficult to convince.

An alternative to failed negotiations is the introduction of a content filtering technology to identify and remove copyrighted materials from the site. The technology is expected to be implemented by the end of 2006. There are a few inherent issues. One of them is related to the manner in which content filtering will affect the YouTube community. YouTube's audience has an intimate connection both with the brand and with the content, if the content is altered, this will undoubtedly impact the brand value and the community.

"There's very little that holds YouTube's audience to YouTube except the belief that whatever they want to see, there is a very good chance YouTube will have it," commented Joe Laszlo, senior analyst with Jupiter Research. "If the video migrates to other places, I fear the audience will too, so YouTube needs to be really careful about how it does this."

Another problem is related to home-made materials that contain copyrighted material, such as a song playing in the background. It is still unclear how content that is on the borderline of copyright infringement will be treated. "We're going to probably see a lot of instances like that," said Michael McGuire, a technology analyst for Gartner Inc. "It's going to be a constant game of cat and mouse."

"It's impossible to be completely effective," said Josh Bernoff, a digital video analyst with Forrester Research. "The devil's in the details."