GOOGLE Inc, the world's largest Internet search engine, is in talks with Japanese copyright holders of television shows, movies and songs to prevent violations on its YouTube Inc video-sharing site.
The company is negotiating with the Japanese Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers, or JASRAC, and 23 other content holders, Google Vice President Norio Murakami said at a briefing in Tokyo yesterday. He didn't give details of the talks.
The negotiations are part of a tussle between filmmakers, publishers and sports leagues and YouTube over how copyrighted works can be used without an owner's permission. YouTube plans to unveil a "fingerprinting" technology this fall to help tackle copyright violations on its site, the company said.
"We do not want infringing material on our site," David Eun, Google's vice president in charge of content partnership, said at the briefing in Tokyo. Japan is the company's second-largest market after the United States by number of users, he said.
YouTube in October removed about 30,000 files from its site that allegedly infringed copyrights after a complaint from JASRAC and other rights holders, Bloomberg News reported.
Google last October agreed to buy YouTube for US$1.65 billion in stock. The video-sharing service had 160.8 million users around the world in March, more than seven times the number a year earlier.