Google has said it will begin testing a technology that can prevent clips of copyright material from being illegally uploaded to YouTube, the video-sharing website it bought last year.

The new system, called video fingerprinting, is designed to pacify content owners who have complained that YouTube does not do enough to prevent copyright clips from being circulated on the website.

YouTube said that the the technology would initially be tested with a group of partners, including Disney and Time Warner, but that it planned to make the service available to other copyright owners by the end of the year.

“We hope to have a better understanding of how this is going to work, not just from a technology standpoint, but also from a policy standpoint,” Chris Maxcy, vice president for business development at YouTube, told The New York Times.

In March, Viacom, the entertainment company, filed a $1 billion (£500 million) claim against Google accusing it of allowing more than 160,000 clips of its programming to be illegally uploaded.

The video fingerprinting technology will be able to identify copyright-protected material, and then give the owner the option of having the clip removed, or keeping it up on the site as part of a revenue-sharing agreement with YouTube.

Google said last year that it aimed to have such a tool available for testing by the end of 2006, but the ability to identify content reliably has proved a big challenge, largely because of the ease with which a video can be altered – even very slightly – before being posted, making it imperceptible to detectors.