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Viacom Sues Google Over YouTube for $1 Billion
Snowgen writes "Viacom has filed a $1,000,000,000.00 lawsuit for 'massive intentional copyright infringement' against Google over YouTube video clips. '"YouTube's strategy has been to avoid taking proactive steps to curtail the infringement on its site," Viacom said in a statement. "Their 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.'"
Google may be rich, but they are nowhere near big enough to bankrupt Viacom. Viacom has a revenue of over $9.6 Billion USD, whilst Google has $10.6 Billion (according to Wikipedia), but this isn't the case of a smaller firm trying to sue a giant. If anything, Viacom, as a conglomerate, will probably have greater cash reserve and certainly has more assets which can be sold off in the event of it needing more cash.
My 3D Texturing Skinning work (under construction)
Yeah, it seems like many other people shared this view when the news of Google buying Youtube came out.
Youtube was popular but not really making any money.
Google buys them, and Google has money.
Now it's Youtube, but with money to sue them for. Google buying them just upped the risk factor considerably. Google has quite a few brainy folks on their side, I'm sure they saw the lawsuits coming. So I'm wondering, what's the plan they have in store for this contingency, because there's no way they would've gone into this without a plan...right?
Please?
Google has been spoiling for a fight over the DMCA safe-harbor provisions for some time now. Their book search and regular search business depends heavily on that part of the DMCA's enforceability. Without it, the Prodigy and Napster decisions could be used to annihilate Google and every other modern search engine.
Its far better for Google to explore the ramifications via a subsidiary company that can be cut loose to die if need be.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
The DMCA is badly drafted because the companies which wanted it -- content providers like Viacom -- deliberately had their lobbyists draft it that way. They expected to use the power of their corporate takedown-letter-writing department to shut down anything they didn't like. They didn't count on a service provider with the capacity to not only host enough content to give their takedown-letter department writer's cramp, but to actually be able to handle all those takedown letters without shutting down.