Six months after it’s initial, self-set deadline for providing content owners with copyright protection tools passed, YouTube has announced that one such tool is being tested now… with plans to roll it out across the board later this year.

From Reuters:

The technology, developed by engineers at YouTube-owner Google Inc., will help content owners such as movie and TV studios identify videos uploaded to the site without the copyright owner’s permission, legal, marketing and strategy executives at YouTube told Reuters in an interview on Monday.

The so-called video fingerprinting tools, which identify unique attributes in the video clips, will be available for testing in about a month, a YouTube executive said.

These tools will be used to identify copyrighted material, after which media companies can decide if they would like to remove the material or keep it up, as part of a revenue-sharing deal with YouTube, which can sell advertising alongside it.

From the way this sounds, content owners will be able to somehow claim and then monetize any and all of their YouTube clips. I assume this includes clips uploaded illegally by users.

If that’s the case, this move could save YouTube.

I’ve said in the past that YouTube’s traffic is largely driven by a handful of original content producers, syndicated media, and illegal content. Oh sure… the funny clips posted from around the Internet and the videos of people living their daily lives bring in a fair amount of visitors. But without the original content, syndicated media, and illegal content, I doubt YouTube would have near the level of traffic it enjoys today.

If Google gives content owners the option to leave their content posted to the site - and make money from it - we may well see a change in attitude toward YouTube. Think about it:

• I own content that gets posted illegally to YouTube
• I can take it down (and make nothing)
• I can leave it up and sell advertising against it
• Someone else does the work of posting the content
• All I have to do is claim it

Would content owners embrace such a line of thinking? I know I would! I’m all for things that make my job easier. Of course someone would have to hunt down and find all of the owned material. But searching that stuff out isn’t really that difficult.

What do you think? How will content owners react to this? How would you react if your content was posted to YouTube? Would you pull it down… or sell ads against it?