As I mentioned yesterday in a post about YouTube, the Google-owned video sharing site has been taking a beating by media companies (and the press) lately.  One of the most commonly heard complaints as of late has been YouTube's position of only offering copyright protection services to content providers with whom the company has a business deal.

Many have said the move was a bully tactic to get content providers on board.  And when rival social networking site MySpace said it would be rolling out free content protection for everyone, many started wondering why YouTube wasn't doing the same thing.

It now appears that Google/YouTube has changed its mind.  According to a report from Reuters, Google has recently made anti-piracy protection on YouTube a company priority.  No details were provided on time frames or specifics.  But the measures are said to be universally available to all content owners… regardless of whether or not a distribution deal was in place.

It sounds like Google finally cracked under the pressure of the media companies.  I doubt this is something they just decided to change.  The whole situation was just silly in the first place.  YouTube was never going to be able to successfully pull off its "only if we've got a deal" piracy protection, anyway.  There are legalities surrounding that content that not even Google can mess with.

It should be interesting to see 1) how long it takes them to actually get this thing going and 2) if it will do much to mend the wounds inflicted on YouTube over the past couple of weeks.