A lawyer defending Google/YouTube in Viacom's $1 billion infringement lawsuit against the company told the presiding judge that the copyright filter it promised entertainment companies last fall would be live on the site -- "hopefully" by September.
Billboard took this to mean that the filter might not go live until after this fall, which is when Google had said the filters would be in place.
I'm not surprised. Any automated content removal system is going to make a lot of mistakes, and there's bound to be a lot of tweaking still to do. Even then, the result would be a dramatically different YouTube, without concert footage, toddlers dancing to music, unauthorized music videos and mash-ups, and so on.
