Big Media is spending millions of dollars trying to prevent popular online video sharing site YouTube from showing Viacom TV shows and films, according to Business Week.Every time the Viacom police team find an unauthorised clip has been used they send out a 'takedown' notice.
Reports revealed that scanning the site is costing Viacom around $100,000 a month and that other companies including Time Warner and NBC are setting up their own police teams.
Rick Cotton from NBC said it was "frustrating" and revealed that 1,000 takedowns were being served to YouTube every month.
According to Viacom, two million clips have been reviewed since November and 200,000 takedown notices have been sent.
To counter the problem YouTube has set up its own dedicated team to deal with takedowns entitled SQUAD (Safety Quality User Advocacy Department).
Meanwhile, MySpace, another hugely popular social networking site, increased the pressure on Google to better police its site content by launching a new anti-piracy feature.
'Take Down Stay Down' will stop copyrighted material being re-posted after it has been removed by the copyright owner.
MySpace launched the new software after it was sued last year by Universal for copyright violation.
Michael Angus, executive vice-president and general counsel for Fox Interactive Media, said: "We have created this new feature to solve a problem that has long frustrated copyright holders and presented technical challenges to service providers."
