This report, by its very length, defends itself against the risk of being read - Winston Churchill
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Viacom case against Google is just daft
IF US MEDIA CONGLOMERATE Viacom wins its court battle with Google then the Internet will be controlled by Hollywood.
Looking through he various court papers it seems that Viacom's interest in getting Youtube to be seen as a 'pirate' is a clever policy to make safe harbour restrictions in the US Copyright Act and Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) null and void.
While it has wanted to distribute clips for its shows, it also wants those it has not approved taken down. Unfortunately it expects Youtube to know the difference. It also expects Youtube to pay vast sums of money if it gets it wrong.
This is the standard behaviour we have seen from the content industries when it comes to what they like to call 'piracy', that is, copyright infringement. They run around like chickens with their heads cut off. On one had they are suing people for so-called 'piracy' while at the same time they need the technology if they are going to survive.
According to an official statement on the court case penned by Zahavah Levine, Youtube's chief counsel, Viacom secretly uploaded its content to Youtube even while publicly complaining about its presence there.
It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site. It deliberately 'roughed up' the videos to make them look stolen or leaked, opened Youtube accounts using phony e-mail addresses, and even sent employees to Kinko's to upload clips from computers that couldn't be traced to Viacom.
Viacom did all this to promote its own shows while often losing track of what it was supposed to have approved.
"As a result, on countless occasions Viacom demanded the removal of clips that it had uploaded to Youtube, only to return later to sheepishly ask for their reinstatement. In fact, some of the very clips that Viacom is suing us over were actually uploaded by Viacom itself," Youtube's spokesperson said.
While there was no way that Youtube could ever have known which Viacom content was and was not authorized, Viacom apparently thinks that Youtube should somehow have figured it out.
Viacom wants Youtube and every other web video service to investigate and police all content users upload, and it would subject those websites to crushing liabilities if they get it wrong.
Levine said that Viacom and plaintiffs claim that Youtube doesn't do enough to keep their copyrighted material off the site. She said Youtube is hoping that the judge will rule that the safe harbour provision of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act will protect Youtube from the plaintiffs' claims.
Viacom is plainly stupid. In labelling serious, responsible operations like Youtube as 'pirates' and demanding money by menacing lawsuits, it is leading many to wonder if its other claims against P2P websites and services are viable, too.
US federal law says that a website is not liable for copyright infringement if it takes down illegal content upon notification. Youtube has done that, so that should have been the end of the matter. Viacom seems to think it can squeeze more cash from online companies and users to cover its own inability to adapt to the Internet. µ
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viacom "Revenue $ 14.625 billion (2008)"
My heart bleeds, we need another 'tea-party' to save them.
"who volunteers to spend time defending a gigantic conglomerate"
Who are we talking about here? Viacom appears at no. 177 on the Fortune 500 list, and Google appears just outside the top 100. Remind me again, which is the more gigantic media conglomerate?
As Mike has said, the suits at YouTube knew full well that the illegal distribution of someone else's property was absolutely the best way to grow their business - and even made jokes about the certainty of lawsuits in emails. But who cares about writing out cheques to the owners of the content you're republishing if by that time you have the money to not care and an ironically anti-capitalist brand with whom idiot teenagers (see above) associate?
In other words, I don't know how anyone with an IQ level greater than that of your average housebrick can see how Viacom don't have a valid case here. How about we start republishing The Inquirer content on a third party site and then see how long it takes conglomerate owners Incisive Media to push a finger up the arse of their legal department?
(Incidentally, to state that "Internet will be controlled by Hollywood" in the event that someone sees Viacom's side of the matter in this is sensationalist garbage. Keep it up.)
Anybody defending viacom in comments better be on their payroll, else they can be classified as completely insane, it's viacom, we all know about viacom.
And even if not, who volunteers to spend time defending a gigantic conglomerate led by an 80+yo old geezer who is so obsessed by penny-counting he'd shoot you in the head if you shortchanged him a single cent on his tens of billions of dollars, even satirical portrayals of scrooges fail to capture his capitalism.
[Viacom secretly uploaded its content to Youtube even while publicly complaining about its presence there.]
That is their perogative, they own the copyright they can upload copies anywhere. Jilly Whotsit doesn't own the copyright and shouldn't be uploading copies anywhere.
[Viacom did all this to promote its own shows while often losing track of what it was supposed to have approved.]
Well that would be their problem if Google deleted it. No big shakes.
[Viacom apparently thinks that Youtube should somehow have figured it out.]
Well actually youtube can figure it out, and does so now. Upload a viacom clip and it gets detected and passed to viacom to decide what to do with it. There are a number of outcomes a) it gets removed, b) it gets left, c) viacom run ads against it.
In those earlier days Google were trying to get viacom to license works to Google before employing the filters. In other words a protection racket.
@Jeenyus Spehler
So what exactly was misspelled? I see no such thing.
Also I find the article easy to comprehend, was it edited since the comments or am I missing something?
On a possibly related note: It seems the retarded (not in the insult manner of speech but the actual condition) are now overtaking the comment section, the choice is with the inq to leave that as it is and see people that have some semblance of coherence leave, and let them have the floor, or to find a way to coax those types back to youtube, your choice, or you can hope it corrects itself, but I didn't see that happen very often on the internet.
both companies and all your readers should sue you for criminally incompetent spelling.
... for the US legal system.
In any other jurisdiction, the fact that Viacom planted evidence would not just flush their case straight down the shitter, but would lay *them* wide open to charges of fraud, and possibly extortion.
But knowing the US, theyll probably win.
Viacom's mistake was in their inconsistency and in their ham-handed efforts to plant evidence. If they had simply been transparent with Youtube, then the extent of the piracy would have been clear.
YouTube in fact does make money, but not off of copyrighted content, but off of posts by internet community. You people get your interpretation wrong. YouTube is not able nor capable of identifying which content is copyrighted, and which is not. If you want to go after someone then go after the user who posted it. YouTube will be more than happy to provide all necessary logs. Viacomm wants nothing but to take YouTube down. This is the only way to keep copyrighted content off of the internet.
Nick, you left a lot of stuff out. Both sides in this case are acting like it's the second Punic War. Viacom has as good a case as You Tube does because both sides have acted like idiots. The MDCA specifically does not allow a content site like You Tube to profit from the distribution of copyrighted material. By revealing a bunch of emails from You Tube's founders and Google execs that they never should have written and that Google tried to hide, You Tube has shown that Google and You Tube knew that 80% of the content on the site was copyrighted, and more to the point that You Tube's business model was based on using copyrighted material to drive up the value of the company and then sell it. That is clearly profiting off of piracy, which is illegal. This is not a slam dunk at all.
This has to be one of the most poorly written articles I have read in a long time. When there are more than two companies being talked about in an article, its ambiguous to use the pronoun 'it' as the subject of each sentence.