Facebook’s Yu joins board of Vobile, a video fingerprint company

Gideon Yu, Facebook’s chief financial officer, has joined the board of directors of Vobile Inc., a startup that automatically identifies copyrighted video content on online video sites, the Wall Street Journal reports (subscription required).

Vobile offers a service called VideoDNA that monitors, tracks and manages online video content, so companies can automatically pull down copyright-violating videos instead of paying people to manually find and remove the offending videos. The company can also identify the contents of a video — information that can be used to serve contextually relevant online ads (a capability not unlike the YouTube-Adsense service Google announced today).

Audible Magic is another company YouTube is using to help it help filter content, but it tracks music within videos only, not video imagery itself, and has been less than perfect.

Yu knows a thing or two about the problems surrounding copyright violations in online video. He left his job as treasurer at Yahoo last year to work briefly at YouTube: He was the guy who brokered the deal to sell YouTube to Google last year.

After leaving YouTube earlier this year, Yu got hired at red-hot Facebook this summer instead of joining venture firm Sequoia Capital as he’d previously planned. [Update: To be clear, Yu is both chief financial officer at Facebook and on the board of Vobile.]

Since the sale, Google has kept promising better copyright detection measures — in the face a billion-dollar lawsuit from Viacom for copyright violations. In July, for example, the company said it would launch a system in September.

Obviously, this is the sort of technology that YouTube needs to implement, and now Yu is getting an inside view of it. Perhaps he’ll be brokering the sale of another company to Google pretty soon here?