YouTube to use copyright checker

YouTube, owned by Google, will use technology to recognise copyright-infringing videos on its site, according to a lawyer for the popular Web site, reports China News.

The lawyer, Philip S Beck, told US district judge Louis L Stanton in Manhattan that YouTube was working "very intensely and co-operating" with major content companies on video recognition technology as sophisticated as the fingerprint technology used by the FBI.

Beck said the video recognition technology would allow owners of videos to provide a digital fingerprint so that if anyone tried to share a video that infringed copyrights, the system would remove it within a minute or so.

The BBC's long-awaited Internet TV service has successfully passed its most important test: remaining fully-functional for its first 48 hours, says the Telegraph.co.uk.

The iPlayer, which was launched at midnight on Friday, had been dogged by months of complicated technical development and regulatory hurdles.

However, concerns that it would struggle to meet public demand were unfounded and the BBC said no problems with the service had been reported.

Canadians anxiously awaiting the arrival of Apple's iPhone are in for a bit of a shock: they may need to move to Rwanda to afford it, says the Financial Report.

That's because the hotly-anticipated device is an Internet-connected mobile multimedia device first and a phone second. As such, it requires large amounts of wireless download capability, the kind for which providers such as Rogers Communications and Bell Canada charge an arm and a leg.

Embarrassing as it is, all this wireless data is cheaper almost anywhere else, including some African nations.

Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, the world's biggest community-written online encyclopaedia, has taken a small step toward his next big goal: a community-search engine that competes with Google, reports MercuryNews.com.

Wales told a group of computer scientists and programmers, gathered at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention in Portland, that Wikia, the for-profit Internet publishing company he founded after Wikipedia, had just acquired search technology that will serve as the foundation for the new search engine.

The technology, known as Grub, creates an index of the Web by borrowing the processing power donated by volunteer computers, similar to the SETI@home project that looks for extraterrestrial life.