NEW YORK/SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Top online video service YouTube will soon test a new video identification technology with two of the world's largest media companies, Time Warner Inc. and Walt Disney Co..

The technology, developed by engineers at YouTube-owner Google Inc., will help content owners such as movie and TV studios identify videos uploaded to the site without the copyright owner's permission, legal, marketing and strategy executives at YouTube told Reuters in an interview on Monday.

You Tube and Google obviously hope to avoid being sued for allowing copyrighted content be put up on the site. So what does this mean in the long run, as when the copyrighted material is found, owners will be given the option of leaving the content up?

Maybe, just maybe, copyright owners will start getting over it and realizing that viral marketing works.