MySpace has extended an olive branch to the music industry with the announcement that it is trialling a video-filtering technology that should be able to recognise when illegally copied songs have been uploaded to its site.

The social networking site, which is the subject of a lawsuit brought by Universal, said that it had licensed a system that scans videos and looks for signature markers, known as vectors, which can then be compared to vectors in an existing database.

Videos which register a "match" — for instance, those that use copyright material in their soundtrack — can then be blocked from appearing on the site.

The technology, which has been licensed from Audible Magic, a Californian company, will supplement existing audio-filtering software and should enable the site to block unauthorised music videos as well as other clips containing Universal's music, MySpace said.

MySpace, which is owned by News Corporation, parent company of The Times, said that the tools would be available to other content owners as well.

"MySpace is dedicated to ensuring that content owners, whether large or small, can both promote and protect their content in our community," Chris DeWolfe, a co-founder and the chief executive of MySpace, said.

"For MySpace, video filtering is about protecting artists and the work they create."

Universal, which is suing MySpace for copyright infringement in a case brought in November, said that the new technology would not compensate for what it considered to be past copyright violations by the site.

"The copyright law doesn't give people the right to engage in the massive infringement of our content to build a thriving business and then, after the fact, avoid exposure [to litigation] by saying they will prospectively start to filter," Peter Lofrumento, a spokesperson for Universal, said.

The announcement of the new filtering technology came as Universal, which represents artists such as U2 and Kanye West, was said to be close to reaching a settlement with Bolt.com, another online community that it has sued over copyright infringement.

Bolt.com, a video-sharing website that had revenues of $7 million (£3.6 million) last year, has admitted that its content was in violation of Universal's copyrights. It will pay a settlement valued at several million dollars, according to The New York Times.

MySpace and other video-sharing websites, such as YouTube, have long had policies to remove material which infringes copyright, but the challenge of monitoring such vast databases — particularly where the music has been uploaded as part of an amateur video and may have been altered — is great, computer experts said.

Several record labels, including Universal and Warner, have reached agreements with YouTube, the largest video-sharing website, about the use of their music.

YouTube has agreed to use filtering software similar to that of MySpace but said that the technology was not ready.