It's a well-known fact that YouTube has serious problems with copyright infringement clips because the users are free to upload any clip they want. Pele, Daniela Cicarelli, Prince, the English soccer association, Viacom and many others were all involved into copyright cases with Google's YouTube after the consumers uploaded their clips without authorization. Because there are so many copyright infringement lawsuits filed against YouTube, let me ask you one question: how does YouTube protect itself against this kind of legal disputes? In case you missed today's news, this day is a real milestone in YouTube's evolution because the online video sharing service released its long awaited video identification tool this morning. This is one of the major steps made by the super giant Google, which is the owner of YouTube, in order to stop copyright infringement clips from appearing on the page.

The function was mentioned just after Google acquired YouTube in October 2006 for $1.65 billion but the Mountain View company postponed the debut until today. Video Identification is supposed to allow copyright owners to discover infringement videos published on YouTube and to remove them as soon as possible.

In addition to this long expected feature, YouTube notifies the users about a potential copyright infringement every time they are trying to upload a clip. The message is displayed during the upload process and is meant to block the video from appearing if the users consider it might infringe somebody's copyright.

But YouTube has always been protected by the DMCA act which states that a video sharing service such as Google's one cannot be accused of copyright infringement since all the clips appearing on it are uploaded by the users. This act even helped YouTube win the copyright infringement case against Daniela Cicarelli, Ronaldo's ex-wife who sued the Mountain View company for publishing videos without her authorization.