There’s always a solution and great potential to make money out of anything, even out of copyright-protected content. In their latest deal, MySpace and MTV Networks have agreed to a new arrangement regarding videos uploaded on the Internet by users: instead of endlessly fighting to remove them, they will rely on a platform to identify the clips produced by MTV Networks and uploaded on MySpace, and turn them into advertising tools.

The technology is very simple: the platform identifies the videos based on the fingerprints taken from the clip’s audio and video data, and then displays an overlay every time the clip is played, showing the original air date, the episode the clip belongs to, as well as links to online stores that users can visit to purchase the entire episode. The fingerprints are matched to prints in Auditive’s database, which includes over 250 million videos sorted by show and airdate.

“Up until now, if you uploaded a clip, you couldn’t do it in a legitimate way. It either was blocked or taken down,” said Jeff Berman, president of marketing and sales at MySpace. “This allows us to go from a world of no to a world of yes.”

The advantage of the technology is that it can identify even the shortest clips that are few seconds long. By introducing ads within the videos, MySpace and MTV Networks follow the example started by YouTube, which launched a similar system giving owners of the copyrighted works the choice of removing the content or adding an ad to it.

Among the clips that will first be targeted by Auditive will be popular shows from MTV Networks such as "The Colbert Report", "Punk’d", and Sarah Silverman, but also other shows such as “The Daily Show with Jon Steward” or “The Hills.”

According to the companies, although users might be a bit reluctant in the beginning to upload these videos, which they know they’re not supposed to upload, in time they’ll get used to the idea. Furthermore, if the idea proves to work, it is also likely to attract content owners and determine them to establish agreements with MySpace.

“This is a step to let consumers upload videos and let us make money on it,” said Mika Salmi, president of Global Digital Media, MTV Networks. Both MTV and MySpace are confident that the technology will be the solution to the legal battles between copyright owners and online video sites.

The best example of such a lawsuit is the one filed by Viacom, who owns MTV Networks, against Google’s YouTube. In March 2007, Viacom filed a lawsuit at the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York for “massive intentional” copyright infringement of Viacom’s entertainment properties. The lawsuit was re-filed in a modified form this year. According to Viacom, Google should get more involved in finding ways to stop users from uploading copyrighted materials.