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Viacom Says "YouTube Depends On Us"
Anonycat writes "Michael Fricklas, a lawyer for Viacom, has an opinion piece in the Washington Post laying out Viacom's side in their $1 billion lawsuit against YouTube. Fricklas asserts that the DMCA's 'safe harbor' provisions don't apply because YouTube is knowledgeable to infringement and furthermore derives financial benefit from it. He also argues that putting the onus of spotting infringement onto the content providers represents an undue burden on them. Fricklas caps the argument by stating, 'Google and YouTube wouldn't be here if not for investment in software and technologies spurred by patent and copyright laws.'"
I've watched plenty of Colbert and other Viacom clips on YouTube, but I think it would still be valuable without them. I frequently view non-Viacom stuff, so saying that YouTube is dependent upon Viacom is an overstatement.
They know Grokster doesn't really apply. They are pushing the envelope, and hoping to widen the precedent. If they can, it makes future legal battles much easier. Of course, it also eliminates DMCA protection for anyone who makes a profit, thus eliminating the only thing about the DMCA that was good for consumers.
http://bgcommonsense.blogspot.com
lobby Congress to alter copyright law in the USA to change the duration to something more reasonable, like 50, 60, hell, even 70 years from the date of original publication, I'd be more sympathetic to their case. With the current: "nothing from the date of the creation of the Mouse will ever enter the public domain situation", I've got zero sympathy for copyright holders.
They need to take responsibility and self police. The company started out as viewer clip oriented but when large numbers of copyrighted clips started appearing they looked the other way. They had to know this was coming they were just milking the situation as long as they could. Given the volume of copyrighted clips they are ineffect claiming them as assets but they have no right to gain benefit from them. They can just say tell us what is copyrighted and we'll take it down but you might as well have a warehouse of a few hundred thousand items with say a third of the items that belong to another company. Is it reasonable to say just tell us what is your's when you removed the items without their permission. It's obvious in this case what belongs to the wronged party but you are saying you'll only return the items the other party identifies. They need to start an approval process like most other sites. Some one has to review at least part of the clip before it's posted. This should be done to begin with to avoid illegal content from being posted. I'm not talking copyrighted I'm talking kiddie porn and such.
Let's file a class action suit against Viacom! After all, they do depend on us, the consumer...
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
I thought a part of the Napster opinion was that a significantly large share of their material was infringing. Now I know this isn't true for Youtube as it seems most of their content is user created. But expect Viacom to use this argument.
True, to an extent. Without copyright, we would have computers, and the hardware makers would have created operating systems and software inorder to sell hardware.
Not so sure computers would have progressed so rapidly without hardware patents though. Perhaps they would, but there has been a lot of microchip development from smaller players who would have been elininated by the big companies if they hadn't had any patents.
The problem is that your volunteers have no way of knowing if something is a copyright violation. Gut feelings and hunches don't cut it.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Especially since the DMCA specifically provides the RIAA with this handy tool. The only thing they have to do to have any content pulled is claim their employers own the copyright. No need to prove it, no need to show any kind of evidence, no official papers needed. They send any ISP a letter saying: the content on page X is ours, the ISP pulls it, since they can't prove who owns the copyright at all, so they'll just take the easy way out. At the moment, they have more to fear from the RIAA than from their own users. (Isn't that nice? You pay these people and they serve another master. That's for another post, though.)
Now they want to take this a step further and have the ISPs police their own network, without any interference from the RIAA. In short, they want to sit back and have you throw your money at them.
The arrogance in claiming that Google wouldn't exist without Viacoms patents is beyond me.
This lawyer is obviously trying to cram the square peg of the DMCA into his round hole. Does Google know that, in general, some people put content up on their site that they're not supposed to? Sure. Does Google get revenues from advertising? Sure. But Congress already contemplated both of those details when they passed the DMCA.
Google may know that, in principle, some of the videos that people have posted are in violation of copyright law. But they don't know which ones, or who the copyright holder is, until they get a DMCA takedown request. This was an intentional feature of the DMCA, to protect service providers from the actions of their users. The sheer fact that this protection is necessary is a clue to any service provider that some of their users will, in principle, post content that violates copyright law.
And yes, Google gets revenues from advertising. But the DMCA requires that the financial benefit that a service provider gains be a direct benefit from the infringement. Numerous free web hosts (Angelfire, Geocities, etc.) have been foisting ads on the people who view their users' web pages for years, and some of the content on those web pages infringes on copyright. This puts those web hosts in exactly the same position as Google, yet those web hosts have never been sued, because the financial benefit those advertisements provide is indirect to the infringing content posted by their users.
The only thing left that the DMCA requires is that a service provider take down infringing content upon receiving a takedown notice, and Google complies with those notices in a timely fashion. Whether Viacom likes it or not, Google qualifies for the safe harbor provision, and this lawyer guy is full of... hot air.
Oh please. You want an easy solution. Setup a website where users can create an account, provide contact information and then search the web and/or P2P networks to report instances of copyright violation.
The irony is, this would be easy to do if copyright was still "opt-in", as it was for the first two hundred years. As it stands now, there's no easy way to determine what is or isn't copyrighted. This was due to the content industry, which wanted to save themselves a few bucks on the "burden" of establishing copyright. Now they find that determining copyright is a burden they want to push off onto everyone else. If **AA's IP was as valuable as they say, and if they were losing as much money to piracy as they claim, it would make business sense to police it themselves. Heck, they'd be at a competitive advantage because they have resources to do this that the smaller guys don't. The fact that they find this burdensome is telling.
One man's -1 Flamebait is another man's +5 Funny.
Only in America could a Corporation have the audacity to suggest...no, not suggest, *say* that technology has been spurred by patent and copyright laws. Perhaps it was, originally, until they got a hold of the fact that it could be used, along with corporate-leaning litigation laws, to stifle competition.
Following this, I'm assuming that Viacom is going to announce that a lack of national health care has made the country healthier by forcing Americans to take better care of themselves.
Just stroll through the most-viewed clips every now and again and tally up home-made vs capped videos.
That's missleading. You need to know what percentage of the traffic the top ten make up as a whole before you can say that Google is living off other broadcasts. The best indicator of this is netflicks, which goes through the entire catalog of film much more than you would expect. The "blockbuster world" is an artifact of previously inferior distribution that was unable to keep up with people's broad tastes. The number one clip may make up less than a fraction of a percent of viewership. I can't tell you for sure because the top ten can easily be rigged.
The smaller the number of blockbusters are relative to total viewership, the easier they are to rig. A company like Mediasentry could be hired to botnet demand Viacom clips and strengthen the Viacom lawsuit. Surely an honest entertainment company would never do anything like that, would they?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I don't watch Viacom's crap on MTV, CBS or Nickelodeon and I wouldn't care one bit if they disappeared from the Internet entirely.
YouTube depends on Viacom?? more like "YouTube a threat to Viacom"
ALL of the big media companies are scared of the Internet because it is breaking the monopoly they have on the flow of information and eroding their customer base of both viewers and advertisers. This has less to do with content than it does with undermining the emerging competitor at all costs.