Viacom sues Google and YouTube for $1 billion
According to BBC News and Reuters, Viacom Media has announced a lawsuit against Google and YouTube, seeking damages for some 160.000 of Viacom’s video clips which are circulating on YouTube.
Recently, Viacom Media, the owner of MTV, VH1, Comedy Central and many other TV networks, ordered YouTube to remove 100.000 clips, a task which YouTube - according to them - has failed to do. Viacom will seek over one billion dollars in damages, a number which would go nicely with their quite successful business results from last year, which you can find on their standardly boring corporate website.
Viacom says to BBC that YouTube’s “business model, which is based on building traffic and selling advertising off of unlicensed content, is clearly illegal and is in obvious conflict with copyright laws.” Unfortunately for us, the consumers, most other media powerhouses’ online business model is doing nothing and waiting for someone to sue or offering DRM-infested, expensive content that nobody wants. To Viacom’s credit, they at least signed up a deal with Joost, showing that there is a business model they support.
Viacom’s moves were easy to predict; like a jigsaw puzzle, everything fell into place. First, they ordered YouTube to remove all of their (Viacom’s) videos, then announced the partnership with Joost, and now comes the inevitable lawsuit. What YouTube wants to do here is to prove that they’re not responsible for the content their users put on the site. It’s basically the same fight that Napster, Kazaa and many others have lost. Google and YouTube were quite good in wriggling out of situations like these so far; we’ll see how well they’ll do this time.
March 13th, 2007 at 8:56 am
Like Viacom indexed each and every single video clip that was uploaded.
YouTube should ask them simply to show them all of the 160,000 clips and sit with a Viacom rep. and delete them manually so they are happy.
It’s a trend, these lawsuits in Corporate America.
March 13th, 2007 at 9:09 am
@Ali: YouTube’s position is that they are not responsible for clearing up the content themselves. If they are given a link of an offensive video and a good reason to remove it, they will comply. But merely asking YouTube to remove thousands of videos will not work.
I like YouTube’s position on this one. They are complying with sensible, concrete demands. But they claim that monitoring all of the videos that are uploaded to YouTube and removing those that are copyrighted is not their job. If they agreed to do that, then they could automatically be held responsible for every copyrighted video they don’t remove.
April 15th, 2007 at 1:21 pm
[…] 6. Video sharing. The problem with video sharing is in content. Sure, you can create a killer service, but how are you going to get people to fill it with content? If you had a million people uploading videos daily, you’d still need a couple of years to catch up with YouTube. And the competition is fierce here, too. Besides heavyweights like Metacafe, Dailymotion, Google Video, there are dozens of smaller sites out there trying to create a userbase. On top of all that, if you do manage to draw attention to your service, expect to be sued. A lot. By companies with lots of money. […]
May 5th, 2007 at 3:34 am
[…] Thus, pretty much everyone is now suing YouTube. The English Premier League, Viacom, Thailand - actually, it’s the hip thing to do now. Not suing YouTube is so 90ies. […]
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