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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.
Google has become quite outspoken. I guess they are big enough that they do not have to scratch anyone's back anymore. I like this approach - Google has the power to change people's perceptions of companies (and countries) seeing as how they do control a large chunk of the flow of information on the Internet.
If Viacom wins there isn't anything that cannot be bought.
Ursula Andress, Catherine Deneuve, and Charo, twice...
I always suspected lonelygirl15 was actually Andy Rooney. This seems to confirm it.
Airplane Photos, Airline News, Planespotting Guides
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
Captain Renault: "I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!" ."
Croupier: "Your winnings, sir.
Have gnu, will travel.
"As a result, on countless occasions Viacom demanded the removal of clips that it had uploaded to YouTube, only to return later to sheepishly ask for their reinstatement."
COCK
xkcd is painfully unfunny.
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.
but it is difficult to believe a corporate legal counsel would post something like that if he could not prove it six ways to Sunday. Indeed, while I am not a lawyer, I would think that Google has grounds to counter sue. As a PR person I am embarrassed for my profession.
you misunderstood; posting an xkcd link is the "oops."
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Tonight I'm gonna sneak my TV onto my neighbor's yard, and then call the cops on him tomorrow morning.
Dirty thief!
I am going to bet they found the evidence in emails/records during discovery or they have an inside source.
Their IPs? I'm assuming they weren't stupid enough to have Viacom for their u/n...
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Meanwhile, at Google, several workers are standing around the search logs from Viacom's business IP address, giggling:
IP laywers in Hollwyood
youtube viacom
youtube cartoon network
youtube comedy central
youtube venture brothers
youtube venture brothers porn
venture brother porn
venture brothers dean naked
what state do judges hate youtube most
penis enlargers
are there any judges who hate youtube
judge who worked at viacom
youtube venutre brothers
I am the richest astronaut ever to win the superbowl.
Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot. ?
I'm certain at least some of those words were English, but those were not sentences.
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.
I'm no lawyer, but if Google can substantiate this claim with evidence, at the very least it'll really hurt their ability to convince the judge:
At the very least, if Google can prove this, they have a battery of arguments that say Viacom acted in bad faith. It might not be proof of blunder on the order of SCO's vacuous litigation, but it will certainly piss the judge off against Viacom.
If I were the judge... well, see the comment title (LoC = Library of Congress).
"We are Microsoft. You shall be assimilated. Competition is futile."
Exactly. As they point out, even the video of your cousin's wedding is subject to copyright. If I take the video and post it, no problem. If you copy the file off my computer and post it, problem. How is YouTube to know who the copyright holder is?
Grandpa is starting to have moments like this.
Have gnu, will travel.
How many uploads classified as breaches of copyright may be attributable to the copyright holders, issued in an attempt to push through shutdown and enforcement legislation?
Also let us not forget that Google has just announced Google TV thus made some fresh enemies. I used to think Google was just pretending to be the good guys, but I have to admit that as of recent developments they deserve kudos.
Brin baby: I'm sorry I once stated you must be smoking crack, I was wrong.
Leave it to Viacom executives to conduct company business using their Gmail addresses. Doh!
For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site. It deliberately "roughed up" the videos to make them look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube accounts using phony email addresses. It even sent employees to Kinko's to upload clips from computers that couldn't be traced to Viacom. And in an effort to promote its own shows, as a matter of company policy Viacom routinely left up clips from shows that had been uploaded to YouTube by ordinary users. Executives as high up as the president of Comedy Central and the head of MTV Networks felt "very strongly" that clips from shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report should remain on YouTube.
Words...they fails me.
[FUCK BETA]
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.
Ever heard about News Corp or Mr. Murdock?
http://dilbert.com/2010-12-13
viatube.com still is for sale.
something like only 1 Billion dollar.
he is probably both smoking crack, and doing these things, just like many of those who read these pages.
Read radical news here
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.
I did RTFA. Viacom retracting a takedown request doesn't prove they put up the clip in the first place. It may also indicate that they were mistaken about the contents of the clip, or simply didn't know that the clip was actually authorized. The question of whether or not these clips damaged Viacom's business model is an open issue. On the one hand, it's free advertising for Viacom; on the other hand, it may be displacing some ad revenue. I don't think any sane person believes damages to Viacom are anywhere close to the $1 billion they are asking for.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Exactly how smart do you think the PR people at Viacon, excuse me, Viacom, are?
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
It's times like these that make me wish for modpoints because I am 100% in agreement with you. Xkcd is one of the few webcomics I read (along with Penny Arcade and Dinosaur Comics) but I'm starting to wish the editors would just post the "obligatory xkcd" along with TFS to get it over with.
http://definitions.uslegal.com/u/unclean-hands/
"The clean hands doctrine is a rule of law that someone bringing a lawsuit or motion and asking the court for equitable relief must be innocent of wrongdoing or unfair conduct relating to the subject matter of his/her claim. It is an affirmative defense that the defendant may claim the plaintiff has "unclean hands". However, this defense may not be used to put in issue conduct of the plaintiff unrelated to plaintiff's claim. Therefore, plaintiff's unrelated corrupt actions and general immoral character would be irrelevant. The defendant must show that plaintiff misled the defendant or has done something wrong regarding the matter under consideration. The wrongful conduct may be of a legal or moral nature, as long as it relates to the matter in issue."
actually, if you are a lawyer working for Google this has to be really fun. Google is providing information to not just win, but to stomp viacom mercilessly for weeks. Lawyers enjoy about nothing else more than that.
if the account has a viacom ip address or a marketing company ip address and there is a pattern it will be pretty evident.
No, he's right. Compare the first 80 strips to the newer ones, you'll see that it was funny on the start but it isn't anymore (or at least wasn't, I don't read it anymore).
I blame the memes and internet fame.
I don't see any contradiction. They've had years to research Viacom's complaints. As they investigate individual incidents, and find funny business related to some of those individual incidents, they compile them and form the basis for this filing. That's a far cry from being able to produce similar details comprehensively about every upload in real time.
We don't know how long it took to document any given incident. We don't know what expense was involved. We don't know what lucky breaks they needed; it could well be that for every incident they have documented, another - or 10 more, or 100 more, etc. - might exist where they couldn't get any evidence of what really happeend.
If Viacom were just retracting their requests, Google's lawyers wouldn't be making the statement they did. It'd have to be one of Viacom's people writing Google saying "Hey, what happened to the videos we uploaded? The page says it was taken down because of a DMCA complaint.". And Google going "Oh reeeeeeally. That's odd, the DMCA complaint was from Viacom too. Left hand and right hand not talking much?". Followed by Google's lawyers getting together with Google's engineers to do a little data mining.
Viacom employees have made special trips away from the company’s premises (to places like Kinko’s) to upload videos to YouTube from computers not traceable to Viacom. See Schapiro Ex. 47 (158:2022); see also Schapiro Exs. 48, 49.
The point is that it's nearly impossible to determine if the person who uploaded the files was authorized. Youtube (apparently) has evidence that they purposefully tried to obscure the source of the upload, making the files look like they were pirated.
Youtube is simply pointing out the contradictions and hypocrisy in all this.
I would have thought that the sound of that would be more of a soft, limp, squishy one...
Clever signature text goes here.
I think that if even Viacom can't get its act together and figure out which one of its own properties is supposed to be on Youtube, it's illogical to demand that Youtube should figure it out.
To get back to the example of the GP, the technical side of figuring out who uploaded something is entirely feasible. The problem is that that information has little to no bearing on whether that person was authorized by the copyright holder to upload the content in question.
I'm getting the impression that this is indeed nothing more that Viacom going on a legal fishing expedition. I'd love to see them slapped with a counter-suit, but am not holding my breath.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
The article itself is brilliant. I don't see where Viacom has a leg to stand on. But strange things happen in lawsuits.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Except that, according the the article, Viacom sent employees to Kinkos to avoid exactly this. Viacom is trying pretty hard to make Youtube's job impossible.
The old saying goes, "never get into argument with someone who buys ink by the barrel."
Maybe we should update it to say: never get into an argument with someone who writes programs that run on whole data centers.
In the supplemantary acticle, Google also alleges that Viacom hired 18 marketing companies to upload clips, and took steps to make the content look pirated. Viacom allegedly even sent employees Kinko's to upload clips, so Youtube couldn't trace the origin back to Viacom. I don't know what evidence they have of this, but if we give them the benefit of the doubt (that's a pretty specific bunch of allegations to simply invent), that would indicate some pretty clear malfeasance on Viacom's part. They were trying to poison the well and not get caught.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
The real argument is that the DMCA safe harbour provisions should cover them. That coverage may be contingent on the practicality argument, and perhaps that is why the argument gets made. However in and of itself, being unable to afford to do something really buys you nothing in and of itself. If you can't afford to do something in a way compliant with the law then you just shouldn't do it. You have to have something more. In this case, it's the DMCA, and that is what the real argument is about.
That combination right there is going to be very powerful, and there are at least two arguments to be based on it: first, if even the copyright owners can't figure out what material is supposed to be there, how are we expected to do so? A followup offer might be "Your honor, if you'll instruct Viacom that they must allow Google and its legal team to index and have access to all of their internal communications and financials, we'll use that information to remove only the Viacom-owned items that Viacom didn't upload or cause to have uploaded."
The second argument could easily be that Google made a strong effort to remove copyrighted materials but that their efficiency in doing so was severely degraded by Viacom's uploading materials in ways that effectively contaminated the identification of infringing materials. Remove all the red ones! OK, here they are. Whoops, I really meant all the red ones except this one, that one, that other one, the one over there and maybe a few more. And how are we supposed to know which ones you want removed? Figure it out yourselves or we'll sue you for one billyun dollars!
fencepost
just a little off
Because when you get sued for a bajillion dollars by someone who wants to own you, it pays to go back throught you servers' IP logs and see if you can find exactly where all their copyrighted content actually came from. Gee, will you look at this; a lot of it comes from these 18 marketing firms. Hmm. They all list Viacom as a client. That's odd. And Kinko's? Hmmm. (Subpoenaing user CC information for workstation abc at Kinko's xyz on day/month/yr/time ... comparing to Viacom org chart ... *exact match*!)
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
Exactly how smart do you think the PR people at Viacon, excuse me, Viacom, are?
Is that a trick question?
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
The problem in this case is that Viacom seems as unable to determine how much is authorized as YouTube is....
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I saw an article recently that claimed that 11.something % of ALL web traffic was related to do-no-evil Google.
An astonishing number (also astonishing is Facebook's 7.07%).
With even 5% of web traffic able to be collected, categorized, linked, crosslinked and inferred through traffic heuristics...
Holy Shit what a force to be reckoned with!
It almost makes me feel bad for the average chump (Corps included, staffed as they are by AFCs), since they willingly give all this info to the bots.
A properly paranoid person would ask for a search anonymiser(sp) to act as a proxy and hunt down random crap to obfuscate the real results.... Anyone know of a service like that I can use?
How amazed would you be to suddenly find that you just forgot what I wrote and you needed to reread my post.... again.
So does this mean that Viacom is out?
Xkcd itself made a (slightly oblique) comment on this, when he criticized people who found amusement in quoting line after line, verbatim, from Monty Python. They're great, but it's a weakness in creativity to endlessly repeat the same funny lines. That type of rote mimicry is exactly NOT what made Monty Python great in the first place.
Douglas Adams receives the same treatment.
Words...they fails me.
They "fails" you?
uh oh... now I've made Viacom angry.
Never, ever screw with a company that's in the business of collecting information. Heck, that's Google's *ONLY* business.
No kidding, can you imagine the resources Google's legal team has to build a case. It's not just the support they get for customized searches of case law. They can get a report of all search terms used by Viacom's legal team. They can see every page loaded that's using adsense. God forbid if viacom is using gmail, google docs, or google voice.
I really take perverse pleasure in imagining Google serving customized goatse ads to Viacom's legal team. "Oh I'm sorry our advanced algorithms determined based on your browsing history that it was relevant to your interests"
Of course - YouTube is videos.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Youtube is simply pointing out the contradictions and hypocrisy in all this.
So they are using the Phoenix Wright Methods then?
Anything can be found funny, from a certain point of view.
I suspect that most of the people at Comedy Central understand this whole Internet thing better than most of the executives in the other divisions of Viacom. As for The Daily Show and Colbert Report, I'm not sure why people would go to YouTube to watch them anyway, since you can already watch them for free on the shows' web sites.
No need for car analogies here because it's typical of what every person involved with sales do. Offer the thing to everybody, but always claim it's not really for sale, it's too precious to sell.
Like when you go to a used car lot and the salesman tells you he cannot hold that car for you unless you close the deal right then and there, because there are so many people ready to take that car at a much higher price.
> Figure it out yourselves or we'll sue you for one billyun dollars!
That is exactly the situation Google would be in were it not for the DMCA Safe Harbor clause (except, of course, there would be no YouTube. And no low-cost Web hosting. And no blogs.)
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
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.
The difference is that an average layman can perform video recording and uploading without causing harm a good deal, if not most of the time.
Brain surgery, not so much.
I think Google's figured out that for a company where information is it's primary commodity (and trading in such), that the free flow of information is in its best interest. Basically the gains they'd make over taking ownership of data the hold would cost them too many of their own customer base. Being trusted, basically, is good for their business model.
As long as that's remembered, Google's movements are actually pretty predictable.
I don't see what Viacom has to gain over this, long term.
this is Murdoching.
As for The Daily Show and Colbert Report, I'm not sure why people would go to YouTube to watch them anyway, since you can already watch them for free on the shows' web sites
For given values of 'you' where 'you' is a person with a US IP address.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
That's the problem. Viacom isn't thinking long-term. They're thinking next quarter bonuses for execs to pad their golden parachutes before jumping ship in 2-3 years for greener pastures.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
And ironically, I've seen people rote quote that *exact* XKCD, and I'm not sure if they were aware of the irony of what they were doing. - Jimmy
In the UK we have something called "conspiracy to pervert the course of justice". Those convicted of it tend to go to prison for a very long time as the courts have a sense of humour failure about it.
Crunh? You know, there's not actually a bone in there--that's just a figure of speech.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
I disagree, I like to think that there is a simpsons or futurama quote, a seinfeld episode, or a xkcd strip that is applicable to almost
every situation in life, or every slashdot discussion
music lover since 1969
The account logs are surely how Google is able to connect the dots. It's more likely an account used to upload from a Kinko's was also used for viewing videos from an IP traced to Viacom. That's the problem with malfeasance. You make one simple mistake and you're bound to get caught. Better luck next time Viacom.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
I think that's what http://scroogle.org/ is all about.
kmem russian roulette: Aquillar> dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/kmem bs=1 count=1 seek=$RANDOM
Maybe Viacom kept it in their gmail accounts.
Which is why we have scroogle.org Of course, you have to take scroogles word that they erase logs after 48 hours... And, just for grins, use the FireFox "TrackMeNot" plugin, which throws random requests.
And, yes, Virginia, you SHOULD be that paranoid.
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
I always figured that Google's interest is in the free flow of your information. They seem to do a pretty good job keeping their own secrets.
That's only true of humans and some higher animals. Many lower forms of life do have a bone in there. And Viacom execs are nothing if they're not a lower form of life...
You must be ginning like an idiot as you randomly get logged out of all your favorite forums and messageboards.
Just get a tin-foil hat or stay the fuck off the internet if you're that paranoid.
"Afford" is extraneous. In general, you just plain can't tell if the person that is uploading stuff is authorized to do so. The information to do so doesn't exist for most content. You can't even determine that someone is authorized to specify that something ISN'T authorized, as this case is demonstrating.
Realities just a bunch of bits.
...have their cake and eat it too.
Wasn't Murdock MacGyver's arch nemesis. Unless you mean Murdoch.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Just a quick dive -- You live in England, use Redhat Linux, have done some systems programming with Perl but not recently. You likely use a Nokia phone, likely an N800.
And, hey, I'm not Google.
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
Well, the reason for the safe harbor provisions is that it would make running ISPs and providing online services EXTREMELY expensive otherwise.
YouTube would have to charge thousands of dollars per month for access. Bandwidth caps would be in the tens of megabytes for ISPs charging under $100/mo.
Yeah, annoying licensing restrictions.
Luckily, the Canadian license holder is CTV, and they're also pretty progressive with their online streaming.
I still get screwed over with sites like Hulu, though, and it's probably going to be a long time before broadcast corporations shed the vestiges of regional licensing.
The details are trivial and useless; The reasons, as always, purely human ones.
Or access to google, and the ability to edit browser settings...
RoseColor red={0, 0xffff, 0x0000, 0x0000};VioletColour blue={0, 0x0000, 0x0000, 0xffff};find / -name *mybase*|chown you
thedailyshow.com and colbertnation.com work fine from Germany, with moderate advertisements (30 seconds before the full show, mostly for other comedy central shows). Where can't you access those sites?
Man.. stuff like this that can be paid by money.
I am citing the youtube blog here:
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to
YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there. It
hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its
content to the site. It deliberately "roughed up" the videos to make
them look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube accounts using phony
email addresses. It even sent employees to Kinko's to upload clips
from computers that couldn't be traced to Viacom. And in an effort to
promote its own shows, as a matter of company policy Viacom routinely
left up clips from shows that had been uploaded to YouTube by ordinary
users. Executives as high up as the president of Comedy Central and
the head of MTV Networks felt "very strongly" that clips from shows
like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report should remain on YouTube.
Viacom's efforts to disguise its promotional use of YouTube worked so
well that even its own employees could not keep track of everything it
was posting or leaving up on the site. As a result, on countless
occasions Viacom demanded the removal of clips that it had uploaded to
YouTube, only to return later to sheepishly ask for their
reinstatement. In fact, some of the very clips that Viacom is suing us
over were actually uploaded by Viacom itself.
Given Viacom's own actions, there is no way YouTube could ever have
known which Viacom content was and was not authorized to be on the
site. But Viacom thinks YouTube should somehow have figured it out.
The legal rule that Viacom seeks would require YouTube -- and every
Web platform -- to investigate and police all content users upload,
and would subject those web sites to crushing liability if they get it
wrong.
-Woof woof woof!
They also work fine in Japan. However, when I was in France on a trip, I got the "this content is not available in your location" message. So some locations are blocked off, but it's not just non-U.S.
In this blog post, Youtube cites the famous "Charlie Bit My Finger" video.
This video is exactly like what Viacom is doing, using bad faith as its extreme. How childish...
I can watch Colbert Report, Daily Show and South Park just fine in the Netherlands, direct from Comedy Central's official sites. No trickery required (unlike Hulu).
Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there. - Will Rogers
Basically the gains they'd make over taking ownership of data the hold would cost them too many of their own customer base.
I think they just understand the basic laws of physics: That there is no such thing as “ownership” of data.
Either you keep full control over it by not passing it on. In which case you can not even prove its existence.
Or you pass it on, and thereby split control with the destination(s).
It can not be taken away from whoever got hold of it. Hence it can not be stolen, but only copied.
So please keep the MAFIAA FUD down.
Thanks.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Not bad. But that has nothing whatsoever to do with server logs, IP addresses or cookies, and everything to do with the fact my username daveime is fairly unique and I use it in a lot of forums and messageboards etc.
Barack Obama has 53.6 million hits on Google, are you going to blame that on "privacy" concerns too ?
Assuming YouTube have the evidence, and it looks like they do, IMO the _executives_ at Viacom responsible should go to prison and the company should be fined an extremely damaging amount.
That is all.
He is not...! Now get off my lawn.
Windows assumes you are an idiot...Linux demands proof.
Viacom is the parent company of Blockbuster Video and they are just upset because Blockbuster is having to file Chapter 11. source.
Except the US site is far, far, far better. The Official site has every episode, ever, if I understand correctly. In Canada, they host back 1 year only... I found out that in 1998 the Daily Show had a guest on that I'd love to see, but due to geography and esoteric MPAA restrictions, I can't see it.
http://marsandmore.com - Posters of space, spacecraft, and astronomy.
-or-
Never try to bullshit someone who owns all your base.
-- I was raised on the command line, bitch
It wouldn't be involved as often if it didn't cover such a broad range of topics discussed here.
The reason it comes up so much is there's almost ALWAYS someone reading these articles that can specifically recall a funny, related xkcd strip.
Viacom allegedly even sent employees Kinko's to upload clips, so Youtube couldn't trace the origin back to Viacom. I don't know what evidence they have of this, but if we give them the benefit of the doubt (that's a pretty specific bunch of allegations to simply invent), that would indicate some pretty clear malfeasance on Viacom's part. They were trying to poison the well and not get caught.
It only says that they uploaded videos from Kinko's. It doesn't say if these accounts were opened from there.
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.
In Soviet Russia OW! OW! STOP HITTING ME!
Free Martian Whores!
The UK is blocked off. Anywhere the shows have local licensing deals, I imagine, or at least if your IP is recorded as being from such a place.
[FUCK BETA]
Crazy talk! The editors should attach a 'most-relevant xkcd' poll to TFS.
Requiem for the American Dream
Some parts of Viacom are thinking long term....
Watch the clips of The Daily Show on YouTube and you're more likely to watch it on TV to get the whole show as it is rather good. This then increases the advertising revenue for those shows ad slots as the viewer figures increase.
Same reason why a lot of bands have their music videos up there - watch the video and you're more likely to go see the band or spend money on their merchandise & products.
Viacom should be thinking of YouTube as a large collection of trailers people explicitly want to go see. Perhaps that's the problem - they're not getting the user info feedback on those people who do watch the trailers.