Google has said that it hopes to have technology in place by September that would prevent copyright-infringing videos being posted on YouTube, its video-sharing site.

A lawyer for Google told a judge presiding over a copyright action that YouTube was working "very intensely and co-operating" with content-producing companies to introduce video-recognition technology that would detect illegally copied material before a clip is posted.

At present, companies must find illegally uploaded videos themselves and alert Google, which will then take them down.

Philip Beck, who is representing Google in the action, told a judge in Manhattan that the filtering technology would be introduced "hopefully in September". He said that Google hoped the technology would "eliminate such disputes in the future."

Viacom, the entertainment company which owns MTV and Nickelodeon, has filed a $1 billion (£494 million) suit against Google, claiming it allowed more than 160,000 clips of programming to be illegally uploaded to YouTube's site.

The Premier League as well as Bourne, the music publisher, have brought similar actions for unspecified damages.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs, whose actions have been combined, welcomed any improvements which would bring an end to copyright infringements, but said that YouTube should have acted sooner.

“Perhaps the filtering mechanism will help – if so, we’ll be very grateful for that,” Donald Verrilli, a lawyer for Viacom, said. He added that it would take until next year to discover the extent of the infringement, which continued to happen "on a very massive scale."

Identifying copyright material has been a major headache for video-sharing websites, which can receive tens of thousands of new clips each day.

MySpace, which is owned by NewsCorp, parent company of Times Online, has said it is trialling a piece of filtering technology that would recognise when a copyright-protected song has been incorporated in a video's soundtrack and prevent the clip being posted.

YouTube said that in response to the action brought by Viacom that it goes beyond what is required under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which gives companies such as Google protection from copyright suits in the US, as long as they comply with requests to remove infringing material.

The company said it removed all unauthorised material once requested to do so.

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