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Viacom Demands YouTube Remove Videos
AlHunt writes "According to the folks at PCWorld Viacom has publicly scolded YouTube for continuing to host throngs of Viacom videos without permission. They are demanding that over 100,000 of its clips be removed from the site. This includes content from Comedy Central (no more Daily Show), MTV, Nick at Nite, Nickelodeon, Paramount Pictures, and VH1. YouTube has acknowledged receiving a DMCA request from Viacom, and the article notes what a dire precedent this could be if Google can't reach an agreement with Viacom and its fellow IP holders."
You need to make deals with copywright holders to show/sell their product online. The hard part is negotiating deals with everyone, not just having a site that supports video.
God spoke to me.
Honestly, the reason I watch the Colbert Report is Youtube. If I hadn't seen Colbert at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, I might not watch the show. I mean, they should complain about full episodes, but if there's 3 minutes of Colbert or Stewart on there, it's just advertising to watch those shows.
...part of me wants to say "fuck 'em"
because someone will re-upload those clips whether Viacom likes it or not.
OTOH, I understand why GooTube doesn't want to piss off the big players in the media industry & will eventually compromise in one way or another.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Viacom is just saying, "It's our content, give us what we want or you can't host it...pay to play suckers!!!". Fault them if you wish but they are well within their rights. Viacom is operating from a position of having the law behind them. Because of that, they get to dictate terms. If they don't like the offer they can tell YouTube to fuck off and die. Maybe the folks uploading the content are ultimately at fault for the copyright violations but YouTube has the responsibility for removing that material at Viacom's demand. Would you want your content out there for free if you could otherwise get paid for it?
I reserve the right to think for myself. Others' opinions are optional. Puppy on lap = typos...not illiteracy.
Our business model is to host content made by others and become fabulously wealthy. If you don't allow us to freely show the material you've paid for our bottom line will be negatively impacted. Please reconsider, for at least as long as it takes to sell our Google stock.
Sincerely,
YouTube
...Cagematch to the death! Two shall enter, one will leave!
With about 10 lines of perl you can rip down all of The Daily Show clips from the akamai servers
I wonder if the complaint will ever show up in the Chilling Effects clearinghouse list?
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
At least they didn't go Disney on YouTube and demand X dollars per every ten seconds of clip on the site.
This just means that you have to find and download a high quality version of the show that you want to watch. You can still get it for free, but you have to work a very little for it. It will only stop piracy committed by the very lazy or very stupid.
This move helps keep YouTube pure. Only people who take a picture of themselves everyday for years will be permitted to post content. Until the RIAA/MPAA copyrights their faces. You thought that we would only get mandatory full body coverings with a totalitarian Islamic government. Wait until you have to wear a burqa to avoid copyright violations.
Actually you don't. The DMCA says that the user that upload the videos are the ones who may be breaching copyright. Online Service Providers such as YouTube have safe harbour from copyright liability provided that they remove content if and when they receive a take down notice from the copyright holder. What YouTube are doing is perfectly legal as it is.
Reaching agreement with the big media companies might make reduce YouTube's workload and reduce news stories such as this one. But it's absolutely not necessary.
Lots of content disappeared yesterday. A lot of it was Viacom stuff. I'm fully expecting more of my favorites to come up with "content removed" notices.
Viacom has been known for its actions in the past. For example: yanking Ren & Stimpy from its creators because Viacom wanted more control. This is par for the course with these folks.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
You mean the Daily Show is no longer available on the Internet?
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
Viacom has threatened YouTube before, and I remember hearing that the Comedy Central clips had gone back up. Here's the previous coverage from Slashdot,
YouTube Removes Comedy Central Clips Due to DMCA
YouTube Restores Comedy Central Clips
Apparently it wasn't as clear cut as I'd recalled, though, and Viacom never actually gave YouTube permission to put the clips back up, they were simply interested in reaching an agreement ($$$). Apparently the recent threats came about because the talks fell through.
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
Short clips of their programs are just free advertising and add to the popularity of the shows. I can understand wanting to eliminate whole episodes, however.
FAQs are evil.
Viacom owns the material and they can do what they want with it. Youtube didn't pay to produce it so they have no right to benefit financially from it. They may not charge to watch the videos but they use them to create value for the company. Viacom may actually want to leave the clips on Youtube but I'm guessing their lawyers advised that it sets a dangerous president. If they allow the clips they may loose control of the shows themselves. In some ways this is up to the court system and where they draw the line. Viacom can provide them with clips but it gets dicey when some one other than Viacom posts the clips without Viacom's permission. Whoever puts the money into producing the material should control it. If you make something it belongs to you unless you give or sell the rights to some one else. That isn't copyright that's been true for roughly twelve thousands years or more.
Viacom's action could establish a precedent and have serious consequences for YouTube ...
There may be consequences for youtube but perhaps the proverbial cat is out of the figurative bag. The real problem here is that the Internet is such an effective and efficient distribution system. I find myself watching more and more news content on youtube simply because it's there when I want it. I don't have to read a program guide or program a TV. I don't even have to own a TV.
If what happened after Napster (as a file-sharing service) was shut-down is any indication, the forces of supply and demand combined with the ubiquity and amorphous characteristics of the Internet are unstoppable, even if youtube were shut down tomorrow, you could expect to see the Daily Show popping up more prevalently on P2P, BitTorrent, or some obscure Russian site.
And if the failure of all those DMCA P2P lawsuits to stop file-sharing from reaching an all-time high is any indication of the world in which we live, people are going to get the content one way or another, no matter what the copyright holders or the law says. All moral judgments aside, that just a fact based in reality.
It looks like Viacom automated their DMCA complaints, and included several videos in their DMCA notifications that they clearly don't hold the copyright to. One of the affected users also writes a Harvard law blog, and posted about it.
NBC has been using YouTube to their advantage to drum up interest in their shows. Recent clips that come to mind are Lazy Sunday and D*** In a Box from SNL:
http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=NBC
Viacom should be taking notes.
But they also know that the value that YouTube is creating with their service is gigantic. That is: sure, YouTube is sending Viacom some free business---but YouTube has the potential to make far more than that themselves.
Put another way, YouTube has far more to lose here than Viacom does.
So Viacom is in fact quite smart to push hard for some sort of revenue stream from YouTube for their content.
You know, that simply doesn't reflect how the economy works. If I put up a cinema, there's no reason, moral, legal or otherwise, why you shouldn't open up a restaurant next door and make a profit from the customers I draw. True, you have no positive right to do so, but there's no restriction on such activity either. Do you want to live in a world in which companies and individuals can control all positive externalities of their actions? As Lemley explains, monopolies are the best way to achieve that kind of control. The pernicious idea that copyright confers an exclusive right to profits (both direct and indirect) is at variance with almost all other market activity.
Where on earth does this come from? Market economies and the labor theory of value are a modern phenomena. Most societies in history have been organized quite differently, with vastly different conceptions of property and ownership. (Your claim preceeds the earliest writing by thousands of years!)
If you ask me, Viacom's action is a negotiating tactic. They know they benefit from the distribution of their programing. But they also know there's money to be made here, so they want as big a cut as possible. Both sides are in a contest to determine how to divide up the pie - which really comes down to a question of relative strength and weakness, not right and wrong.
What use are the internets without my daily fix of Stewart and Colbert?
Every Comedy Central show (or at least several, including The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, South Park, et al) has a presence on comedydentral.com that includes the shows as video clips similar to YouTube. The problem is that although the advertisements for their "motherload" section claim you can watch entire seasons of those shows online, the simple fact is that that is not true. In the case of the Daily Show and Colbert the shows are broken up so that you can see the interviews and a few seperate bits that Comedy Central considered especially funny, but not the whole show. In the case of South Park, what episodes are on there are inexplicably missing bits that come in between the breaks they have made in the episodes. They also don't really have the episodes that just came on even though even the website claims that they do.
When I missed "Go God Go part II" which was part 2 of a humourous South Park take on the debates on religion, the causes for war, and teaching evolution in public schools (which still does not happen in way too many districts for a 21st century America), I had to wait for it to come on YouTube because unlike every other South Park episode in existence it was not repeated ad nauseum through the week (they showed some ancient episodes instead) and it was never available on the comedycentral.com website (which would have been missing parts and laden with advertisements anyhow). There is the additional problem that though YouTube seems to have no problem giving you a direct link to any video on their site, there is no way to navigate Motherload other than the obscene and fairly broken flash interface Comedy Central foists upon us.
If Viacom just did what consumers wanted and actually made shows available for viewing in their entirety when you miss them or when you want to refer to them later there would be no need for YouTube for these shows. No one would care about putting stuff up there otherwise. As it is, YouTube is easier to use and provides the content people want. In any event their very complaint is unjustified and proves that YouTube's policy works. They quickly remove any content that breaks copyright as soon as the copyright holder complains. That's what happened here. And, again, just like the music industry, they have created their own problem because they cannot see that this "violation" fills a void in the market that they could exploit themselves if they had a brain in their head instead of a head in their ass.
You do realize that this is, what is effectively known as monopoly practice and what most of Slashdot would expect from companies like Microsoft, bot not Google. In any case, abusing power in one field to gain momentum (make a point) in another is monopoloy practice. So no, Google will not do that if they have anything in their heads.
Viacom forced YouTube to take down 100,000 videos today, and to send out tens of thousands of DMCA Complaint notices. Viacom made the list of "infringing videos." How did they make it? I bet they used spiders. The spiders were not as sophisticated as one might hope. I suspect that thousands of truly innocent videos are now blocked on YouTube. This happened to me yesterday. ahref=http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/jim/2007/02/02/ 100000-mistakes-by-viacom/rel=url2html-27817http:/ /blogs.law.harvard.edu/jim/2007/02/02/100000-mista kes-by-viacom/>
I received a DMCA Complaint for a genuine personal video that is certainly not infringing on Viacom. Here is the complaint.
ahref=http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/jim/2007/02/02/ viacom-owns-this-the-original-of-this-video-was-ta ken-down-from-youtube-at-viacoms-request/rel=url2h tml-27817http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/jim/2007/02/ 02/viacom-owns-this-the-original-of-this-video-was -taken-down-from-youtube-at-viacoms-request/>
Here is the video, now hosted at Google Video. Let me know what you think!
John Palfrey of the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School blogged about my situation.
ahref=http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/palfrey/2007/02 /02/viacoms-cease-and-desist-letters-for-a-home-vi deo/rel=url2html-27817http://blogs.law.harvard.edu /palfrey/2007/02/02/viacoms-cease-and-desist-lette rs-for-a-home-video/>
He received a very nice email from a man named Michael Fricklas of Viacom. Mr. Fricklas apologized for the mistake, and said that it had already been corrected. Hmmm. When I last checked, which was just a minute ago, the video was blocked.
How many Slashdot folks have the same problem? How many "mistakes" were made? Please let us know. Was I the only one???? Maybe!
PS There is an online center for sharing complaints if you think you are an innocent victim of Viacom. ahref=http://www.toptensources.com/topten/YouTube- and-Viacomrel=url2html-27817http://www.toptensourc es.com/topten/YouTube-and-Viacom>