iFilm Infringement Could Blunt Viacom's YouTube Argument

Radio Silence writes "Infringing videos on iFilm could undermine Viacom's case against YouTube. Although it's arguably not a nest of infringement like YouTube, iFilm appears to host more than a handful of videos for which its corporate parent Viacom does not own the copyright. More importantly, Viacom isn't engaging in the kind of proactive infringement identification practices it expects of YouTube, which may cause problems for them in court. 'if Viacom isn't willing to take the same steps with iFilm that it wants YouTube to take with copyrighted content, Viacom may have a harder time making its case before the judge presiding over the case. "It would have some persuasive value with a judge if YouTube says 'look, they're ranting and raving about all this infringement occurring on my site and they're not doing anything about it themselves,'" said copyright attorney Greg Gabriel.'"

Comments

Re:I'm confused

[j00r0m4nc3r]

I think it's more like, "Your honor, the industry standard is to not self-police your sites. It's a public site and people can upload copyrighted material. All Viacom has to do is tell us which items are infringing and we can remove them. See, even Viacom doesn't self-police themselves on iFilm..."
There's sort of a fine line between the two...

Re:IANAL, but..

[MsGeek]

IANAL either, but this is the doctrine of unclean hands. It can be used to get the YouTube case laughed out of court. Which it should. Viacom is expecting YouTube to do something Viacom does not do itself on its own, similar website. Buh-bye, Mr. Redstone.