Viacom Vs. YouTube, Beyond Privacy

Corrupt writes "As Viacom is granted access to YouTube user records, a bigger threat to user-generated sites emerges: The law is increasingly siding with rights owners."

Comments

Hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

The "law" is increasingly siding with "rights owners."

So?

Re:Hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

One page version of the article.

You'd have thought Taco would be linking to the print version whenever possible by now...

Re:Hmm

[lazyDog86]

I disagree strongly. The "law" is always picking winners and losers. Often we all agree: muggers should be the losers and their victims should be the "winners," albeit not the best win you'll ever get seeing a guy who robbed you sent to prison. It's the best the legal system can do for you.

But, as you get into more commercial areas, the law is picking winners and losers all of the time in ways that there is not so much general agreement as to who the winners and losers should be, often skewing things in favor of existing players. I meant who writes the law? Politicians. And, as near as I can figure, it's axiomatic here on /. that they're all as corrupt as humanly possible. So the "law" favors whoever gives them the most money.

Now I do tend to agree with you that we still do a pretty good job when it comes to the adjudication of the law that judges should be, and are usually neutral. And they with usually result in fair rulings under the law. But the laws were written by politicians and that is the problem.

Re:Hmm

[Trailer Trash]

I meant who writes the law? Politicians. And, as near as I can figure, it's axiomatic here on /. that they're all as corrupt as humanly possible. So the "law" favors whoever gives them the most money.

It's worse than that. The media company lawyers wrote the DMCA, and greased the right politicians to get it passed. It's funny that they're now angry that their own law apparently wasn't enough for them.

Politicians rarely write these big laws. They're written by special interests and given to their own bought & paid for congressmen to pass.

Re:Hmm

[KGIII]

Just a bit of additional information/clarification. Viacom is a member of the MPAA. (Paramount Pictures Viacom.)

Re:Hmm

[AceofSpades19]

copy right infringement != stealing

Re:Hmm

[Mr. Slippery]

copyright infringement is stealing someone elses exclusive publishing rights.

You can't steal someones rights. You can only steal property. Copyright is not property (the canard of "intellectual property" notwithstanding).

If you publish something without permission, you diminish what the authorized publisher gets by being an authorized publisher, most noticably, their chance at making sales.

If you set up your widget shop next to mine, you diminish what I get from selling widgets. That doesn't justify my use of force to close you down.

It's the golden rule...

[Anonymous Coward]

The one with the gold makes the rules... or rulings in this matter.

Re:Huh?

[Sen.NullProcPntr]

This isn't about Congress and it's not limited to the US.
From TFA;

Increasingly, however, the courts are siding with rights owners and ruling that Web sites are responsible for illegal submissions.

And;

A French judge ordered eBay to pay Louis Vuitton handbag manufacturer LVMH (LVMH.PA) $61 million in damages. In doing so, the judge rejected eBay's argument that it is not responsible for illegal items sold by users because it provides tools to request removal of infringing goods and takes them down once notified.

Re:Huh?

[Daniel Dvorkin]

As TFA points out, the DMCA -- as unlikely as this seems -- is actually on the side of the angels in this one. It's a bad law, but one of the few good things it does is provide a measure of immunity to content-hosting sites, as long as those sites comply immediately with takedown requests. Viacom et al., having managed to get pretty much everything they wanted written into the DMCA a while back, are now arguing against the immunity provisions therein. These bastards just never quit.

Interesting comments on TFA

[MRe_nl]

by the author, in response to comments;
"In the end, this lawsuit is all about money. That's somewhat fair. As Web advertising revenue grows, more companies are likely to want to partner with sites like YouTube than sue to have content removed. Thus, ultimately, the greatest impact of Viacom's lawsuit may be the amount of money Google feels compelled to share with content creators. If Viacom shows much of YouTube's traffic shows up to watch copyrighted content, at least initially, then Viacom may be able to successfully argue outside of court that Google owes creators like themselves more money. Incidentally, News Corp, head of the Fox network, owns MySpace."

and this should be funny in a sane world, but alas:
"Maybe youtube needs to do what the government always does when they are forced to turn over information. Delete all of the relevant information or make it unreadable. Print it out in text format then have someone go over every other line with a black marker."

also, somewhat offtopic (or is it?);
If you want to stop Google from building a complete profile of your browsing outside of *.google.com, just add this line to the bottom of c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts in notepad: 127.0.0.1 www.googleanalytics.com -- then visit the creepy google.com/history and turn that off.

Grossly exaggerated

[John Hasler]

> As Viacom is granted access to YouTube user records...

Viacom has not been granted access to YouTube user records. Experts to be hired by their outside attorneys have. They are under court order not to disclose any user identifying information to any one, including Viacom. They, the lawyers, and Viacom are also under court order not to use any of the information for any purpose other than that specified in the order (which excludes using it to identify people to sue).

Re:Heard this before

[Original Replica]

Mod parent back to Ontopic. Here is the YouTube video the parent was referring to. The Viacommie discussion starts at the 2:00 mark.

Sign the Viacom/YouTube petition!!!

[AnonStar3001]

Sign the petition at http://www.petitiononline.com/privacy9/petition.html Btw, this petition is full of interesting comments, go read it! POWER TO THE PEOPLE!

Companies Viacom ownes

[coolsnowmen]

There seemed to be some misunderstanding so:
According to http://www.cjr.org/resources/
Viacom ownes:
Cable
        MTV
        MTV2
        mtvU
        Nickelodeon
        BET
        Nick at Nite
        TV Land
        NOGGIN
        VH1
        Spike TV
        CMT
        Comedy Central
        Showtime
        The Movie Channel
        Flix
        Sundance Channel
Film
        Paramount Pictures
        Paramount Home Entertainment
Other
        Famous Music