That's what the lawsuit is about - to give them leveerage when they negotiate the deal (which I imagine they have already been doing). This case isn't going to trial ever.
Tort reform? Two multi-billion dollar companies are the last entities on Earth who need tort reform. Besides, copyright enforcement is necessarily done by lawsuit. It's the way it works. Generally speaking, tort reform sucks. Lawyers have less incentives to take an individual claim, and bad actors have more incentive to do bad things. It sounds great "for the economy" until you get hurt and become a possible plaintiff, only to find out that Texas has capped damages to where your suffering, no matter how severe, is limited and no attorney will take your case unless you pay them by the hour. Tort reform is a myth perpetuated by the insurance and medical lobbies. Frivolous lawsuits settle or get counter-sued into oblivion. Besides, the damages limits brought by tort reform only protect big companies while still leaving average Joe and Jane open just as much liability as before.
Not really. If VIACOM can prove that YouTube knew the stuff was copyrighted, Viacom has a case. Also, if there was no warning to NOT POST COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL on YouTube, YouTube is liable. After all, the material IS on their servers, yo.
It's the users that do it, but YouTube is the enabler. If I open my house up and knowingly allow drug-dealers to do business there, I am responsible for that. Same basic principle here. It was also the same principle that destroyed Napster.
amazes me that people think that Viacom . . should give away what they spent millions making to another company to make money offf of for basically free or even give the a peice of the action for no other reason than they took it for free anyway Rocket River You cannot steal a man's apples .. make a pie then tell him it is fair for ya'll to split it
right, what i'm saying is this: 1) if youtube put it on there they are responsible or 2) if it was on there, and they knew about it and didn't try to remove it, they are responsible having said that, i've encountered several videos that i wanted to watch but were removed because they were copyrighted. i think google/youtube has made an effort to remove content, and therefor isn't liable.
The first thing I thought of when I heard about this lawsuit, other than the $1.5 billion price tag for YouTube (and the permanent demise of Naztradamix and the "Juggernaut B*tch" parodies), was "WebJunk20," that (Viacom-owned) VH1 show that was 30 minutes of YouTube clips. Then I thought about all the news and entertainment programs that use YouTube clips on their programs. Even though it wouldn't be anywhere near comparable in scope, would YouTube (by themselves or in collaboration with their posters as a plantiff class) have any kind of a counter claim?
Well, Viacom is clearly in the right here. I mean, YouTube must be stealing TONS of money from Viacom by playing those videos. After all, I'm sure the ad dollars they lost since the half dozen people who used to watch VH1 Classic (the only station that actually plays music videos) left for YouTube must represent, what, 2/3d's of their yearly profit.
Doesn't matter, really. They created a service that they knew would encourage and facilitate copyright infringement. It shouldn't be the responsibility of the copyright holder to scour tens of thousands of videos on YouTube and constantly report them to get them removed.
Do you have any idea how much the advertising that YouTube can and will sell off of stolen content is worth? Are you saying people shouldn't protect their intellectual property unless it's worth a ton?
What I'm saying is the cat is out of the bag. I was VERY critical of P2P when it came to getting free music, but, guess what, music is adapting. It has no choice. Adapt or die. Record labels have resorted to suing kids because they don't know what to do and they can't stop it. YouTube represents something television networks can't provide: a single, centralized source of information. Even if YouTube dies, someone else will do the same thing. A few very smart TV networks have realized this and USED YouTube to help drive interest in their brand. Others, like Viacom, have threatened or actually sued. Technology is altering old business models that were, no doubt, very profitable for many companies. But, as quickly as they are being forced to adapt, new companies are showing up and providing alternatives. The single most important development in internet technology in the last 10 years is the sharing of content through Web 2.0. It is single-handedly altering how we learn about things, share information and even report the news. It isn't going to end because consumers see the advantage of it. YouTube delivers content ON DEMAND in a way that has never been done before. Just like when Napster was killed by the RIAA, 20 more P2P networks cropped up, the same would happen if YouTube got shut down or limited. As someone said in a post about the RIAA recently, you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube. And on the subject of music videos, I can PROMISE you that bands who get little or NO airplay on Viacom networks would FAR prefer for YouTube to display their videos so that they could get the promotion from them than to have them sit and rot in a vault at Viacom.
i think under dmca safe harbor provisions that is the process. http://www.chillingeffects.org/dmca512/faq.cgi
Do whole episodes/movies appear on YouTube very often? I've only ever seen clips. And it's usually just television clips.
So how do places like http://www.imeem.com survive? Big corps waiting till they have lots of $$$? (Imeem is a site with lots of music like youtube has vids)
The problem for viacom and such is that people like myself don't even watch TV much anymore (except for rockets game). Anything worth seeing ends up on youtube or bit torrent and I just watch from there. Traditional TV companies suffers from this because their ratings go down and they lose advertising dollars.
Google tells viacom to reap what it has sowed: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/28/AR2007032802057.html
