YouTube has released their anti-piracy system to prevent the uploading of copyright protected materials onto its servers.

On Monday, the company unveiled a long-anticipated system that, if effective, would allow media companies to prevent their clips from being uploaded to YouTube without permission.

Whether the system will work well enough to satisfy media companies irked by the proliferation of unauthorized copyrighted clips on YouTube is not yet clear. But if successful, the system, which Google is offering to all media companies, could usher in détente between them and Google.

In order for the system to work, media companies must first upload their materials onto YouTube.

Google said that its video identification service, which was developed by its own engineers, required media companies to submit their digital video files to Google, which would then create what technologists call a digital “fingerprint” for each file. That fingerprint would then be uploaded to a large database. Once a user uploaded a new clip, the same technology would determine whether that clip’s fingerprint matched a fingerprint in the database.

Content owners could instruct Google to block clips whose fingerprints matched their copyrighted clips. Alternatively, they could ask Google to promote the clip and even place advertising around it, to share revenue from the ads.

Web based piracy is estimated to cost meida companies $60 Billion due to the uploading and downloading of copyright protected materials.