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Google Slams Viacom For Secret YouTube Uploads
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Reuters: "Google, Inc. accused Viacom, Inc. of secretly uploading its videos to YouTube even as the media conglomerate publicly denounced the online video site for copyright infringement, according to court documents made public on Thursday."
As "statements from the corporate counsel's office" go, this post on the YouTube blog is pretty hot reading.
This story illustrates a whole new sort of corporate stupidity. I propose from now on that such an action should be known as Viacomming, drawn from a new verb. To Viacom. Definition - to stab yourself in both feet by litigating against your own principal shopfront.
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
While they do this they're changing people's perception of Google as well ... and not always for the better.
The problem isn't that Youtube doesn't know who uploads stuff, but that they can't tell if the person that is uploading stuff is authorized to do so.
At the very least they'll have copies of the requests from Viacom to restore the videos that Viacom demanded be taken down, and most likely Google required that those requests state exactly why Viacom has the authority to make that video available. They also probably traced the IP addresses, odds on more than a few times somebody slipped up and uploaded videos from an IP traceable to a machine belonging to Viacom or one of it's marketing companies. The marketers have no dog in this fight, if Google's gone to them with apparent proof that they've been uploading Viacom's videos the marketers won't have any qualms about pulling out their authorization from Viacom to cover themselves.
Google hires some pretty good lawyers. I doubt they'd be making such a strong statement in a legal action if they didn't already have what they needed to back it up.
Further - they cannot afford to do this sort of investigation on every single one of the millions of videos on Youtube.
http://techcrunch.com/2009/05/20/every-minute-just-about-a-days-worth-of-video-is-uploaded-to-youtube/
I imagine that they have only had the resources to investigate a sample of the alleged videos well after the fact.
Never, ever screw with a company that's in the business of collecting information. Heck, that's Google's *ONLY* business.
The crunching sound you hear is viacom stepping on its own dick.
xkcd is painfully unfunny.
and you're painfully retarded. seriously, it hurts even to think about how retarded you are.
like, you're making Trig Palin look very, very smart by comparison.
This is the sort of shit that people who read xkcd find amusing.
Eh, there's a difference between reading it and finding it amusing ... and feeling a need to bring it up in every possible discussion and work it into every conversation, like some kind of obsession. I think what you're talking about applies to the latter and not the former.
Xkcd is pretty good, and for the most part I can appreciate its humor. However, it's not so good that I want to see it in every single Slashdot story. If anything, that's a great way to make me not want to read it. Turning something into another mindless meme is not a great way to promote it. This thread indicates I'm not the only one who feels that way.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Wow. Facts aside, this is the clearest, most straightforward legal/PR writing I've read in years. Makes the point with no dodging and evasion, no complicated jargon, it's short, clear, and on point.
Kids, if you ever wonder why English 101 is mandatory at your college, this is why: so maybe someday you'll be able to write like this.
Who would you rather have controlling a large chunk of the flow of information on the internet, Google, or Viacom?
I can understand the consternation that has sometimes arisen regarding Google, but I think some of it might be because we're not used to transnational corporations acting like anything but rapacious, greedy monsters who hate their own customers and would sell weapons to Al-Qaeda if it meant a 2% bump in quarterly profits.
Google may be far from perfect, but they're also far from your average transnational spawn of Satan.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Perhaps Google wants not to have billion-dollar lawsuits fabricated and leveled at them.
Just another proletarian malcontent.
I'm not sure what Google wants...
Information. They get information on you to deliver targeted ads to you, and they are unlikely to give away this information easily because it is their core product and core source of revenue. Some see this as a bad thing and others don't really mind.
Anything can be found funny, from a certain point of view.
If these allegations are true, it is the very definition of unclean hands...
And people wonder why we need net neutrality. This should shine a bright light into why it is so needed.
I'll also add this. What was Google's business case for buying YouTube? You think they didn't know that YouTube was rife with pirated content? The article also talks about how little documentation Google produced on the whole deal. Both sides knew what they were doing (*wink*, *wink*).
Now of course there is a possibility that Bob from accounting created an account and uploaded baby videos. But such videos wouldn't raise the ire of viacom, nor would they fall under a DMCA request. So that means Bob would have to be uploading Viacom property. As far as I know an employee stealing their employer's property isn't anyone's problem except the employer and the employee. You can't sue someone else for it - well you can, but you'll lose. So everything Google says makes sense, and I can guarantee that a company that makes its living off of tracking users has the logs. You're right, there's not a speck of evidence; there's a goddamned ocean.
Who would you rather have controlling a large chunk of the flow of information on the internet, Google, or Viacom?
Both...and more besides. Even if Google is benign now they are a company and so their directors and owners can change over time. If you have a good diversity of companies 'in control' then there is a greatly reduced possibility for one of them to misbehave because, if they do, people will move away from them. This is about the only thing that we can do to make a company sit up and listen and if we are unable to do this because there are no alternatives then we are in real trouble.