Up until now, watermarking and file tagging has been a few ways of marking a file has copyrighted or owned by someone, but with the issue of pirates finding ways of overcoming tags and watermark features, the Virage division of Autonomy has developed a new search technology, ACID, which does not rely on watermark or tags.  Instead, it uses patented image and audio analysis technology when scanning content to find relation ships with a wide range of content types.  It also claims to support over 1,000 formats through the use of its Intelligent Data operating Layer, which includes other types of data, such as text and word documents to go beyond just audio and video piracy.  It will also detect clips and overlaid content involving copyrighted material.

Acid can be made to run as a highly automated process to prevent the posting of copyrighted material without a tedious manual approach of looking through already posted content or content waiting for approval.  For example, the company mentions it can be used with virtually any video posting website, such as YouTube, to prevent the current issue of users illegally posting copyrighted video.  It can also automatically check clips already posted on video sharing sites, which would help with the removal before the illegally shared content ends up landing the website's owners in court.

From what I can see, while this may work well for online video sharing sites and blog sites which allow the posting of audio & video content, this will unlikely have much impact on actual P2P file sharing unless the P2P software providers implement the technology.  Even if they do, users are not suddenly going to update the file sharing software. 

Thanks to DamnIfIknow for letting us know about this news, along with this comment:  Next up: Automated tool to sue people for copyright infringement....oh wait....the RIAA all ready has that! ;)