On March 13 2007 Viacom a US media conglomerate owners of MTV, DreamWorks amongst many others announced that it has filed a $1 billion copyright infringement action against both YouTube and Google, alleging that the sites have allowed Viacom’s copyrighted content to be illegally displayed. Viacom execs and the company CEO has promised, according to The Wall Street Journal, to add $500 million to Viacom’s digital revenues. Apparently, part of this plan includes taking it from Google’s deep pockets.

One year ago, this would not have been possible, but the world has changed. In the past 12 months, thousands of ordinary people have become famous. Famous people have been embarrassed. Huge sums of money have changed hands. Lots and lots of Mentos have been dropped into Diet Coke bottles. The rules are different now, and one website is majorly responsible for widening public consciousness to the new web. Even the sites contributors were named Time magazines person of the year in 2006.

When Goo Tube was created in late 2006 Eric Schmidt said that it was about vision, not about business, and that the YouTube guys reminded him of the early days of Google. But most of Schmidt points were best suited to a PowerPoint presentation and he had no real answers. YouTube is notoriously unprofitable, and much of its popularity can be attributed to the massive amount of copyrighted materials its users can access for free today. When Colbert clips were recently removed, they lost 10 million hits in a day. Why Google wanted to dilute its earnings and get drawn into a whole new set of copyright battles, when it has a few controversies of its own to deal with today.

Most of these short form clips are not sanctioned by the content owners, and YouTube works hard to remove them as soon as it notices, or one of the broadcast or cable networks alerts them. Still, with 65,000 or more videos available every day, it’s been argued that it is impossible for YouTube execs to keep tabs on all them and know when copyrighted content has been added to the mix. But according to Viacom YouTube would only make filtering available to companies who make deals a la Warner Music. Rather than “doing no evil” and implementing a technology they say they have in place and saving the millions of small copyright owners time and money, they choose to save that technology and use it only for those big content owners they can swing deals with. But they stop porn, YouTube works around tagging if you can’t tag it users can’t find it.

Wouldn’t it seem logical that various videos that are obvious copyright violations have been flagged as objectionable?. By their own admission YouTube employees review them. I would guess they have seen content that any rational person would understand to be copyrighted particularly in this era of all the RIAA and MPAA training we all unfortunately receive. Bottom line is this. If you can train someone to ID porn, you can give them some basic training in identifying materials from someone who just sent you 100k takedown notices.

Goo Tube has taken the arrogant position with big media that “You can’t stop us. You can’t stop people from uploading your copyrighted materials and if you want us to, you have to do a deal with us”. With the little copyright owner who feels their work has been illegally hosted on Google Video they simply try to intimidate them.

Creators of content have the right to decide how and where their content will be used. Some will choose to let it be shown on YouTube because they feel it will promote their brand. Others will choose to keep their content off YouTube. It is their choice, not ours, not YouTube’s. It doesn’t matter how short sighted you think Viacom is, or how they don’t see the potential value to their brand.
It is not about how they treat Viacom. VIacom is big enough to take care of itself. It is about hiding behind a law, the DMCA, at the expense of copyright owners, to dominate the online video space. The Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act (OCILLA), a portion of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act known as DMCA 512 or the DMCA takedown provisions, is a 1998 United States federal law that provided a safe harbor to online service providers (OSPs, including internet service providers) that promptly take down content if someone alleges it infringes their copyrights.

If the goal of the DMCA was to protect every website that enabled the uploading of User Generated Content, take my word, all the politicians, as firmly rooted in the back pockets of the media companies as they were and are, would have explicitly used the term website. The DMCA was not made to protect me and my friends, but to stop us from doing what we were doing, while protecting a dial up provider from being sued for my illicit activities. Any idea to the contrary is ludicrous.

Google has been building a new medium on the backs of the news industry, without paying for any of the content. The news aggregators are taking headlines, photos, sometimes the first three lines of an article. This would be fine if the news agencies were openly offering the content as RSS feeds but they are not. And don’t get me started on Googles systematic copying of entire books still protected by copyright. Google’s argument of fair use in this case is bogus again asking book owners to ask for their book to be removed. I also want to make it clear I agree with Google on net neutrality, I pay for my bandwidth bill Google should not have to pay again.

People argue Viacom should be embracing YouTube and worry less about money up front and more about how it can work with the millions of people who are currently viewing Viacom content on YouTube. It’s a huge opportunity..But you must remember there’s a world of difference between a broadcast network and a collection of cable networks. And expand the argument to pay services like HBO. These commercial free channels subsist only on subscriber revenue. If you can piece together an episode of The Sopranos via YouTube, then the entire reason to subscribe to HBO disappears.
Viacom may ultimately succeed in getting every single Jon Stewart clip eradicated from thousands of YouTube pages. If they win which I doubt because I think they are playing cat and mouse, and potential revenue losses from not being ranked on Google far out way $1 Billion dollars if they go into litigation , they could even scare off consumers from posting their own clips. If Google threatens Viacom in this way or carries out such a threat they risk blowing everything they have done well in the last five years. My hope is that this lawsuit is not a negotiating ploy as it will help bring the issues of thr DMC to mainstream attention and help shape future content distribution.

The loss of copyrighted material at this point (since Google has up to now ignored user generated content ) may be a nail in the coffin for YouTube whose core audience is the fickle teen, twenty something’s whose habits change like the weather . This instant message crowd will levitate toward the sites which their friends use online. They will leave a site on mass at the drop of a hat, just look at the decline of MySpace and the rise of face book for evidence.

Simply put a web user can switch from many different sites for content and satisfaction I am a web fan boy. If I see NBC making a new site with my favorite show, of course I’ll go check it out. Joost last week launched a new documentary on “Lions in Africa”, of course I will go and check it out too. The Real question is during my journey in this web 2.0 world, which place do I consider home and where I will hang around and contribute towards.

Also contrary to popular opinion online video watching is not that widespread amongst the populace .Yes everyone will get an email here and there and watch stuff on a laptop or iPod at times but very few people will site in front of a pc screen rather than a TV. More people watch online video than any other time between 10am to 5pm, mon to fri. Thats when 30pct of all online video viewing takes place. If you want to go a little earlier, for those that get to work early, add another 7pct. So that 37pct of all online viewing activity takes place from 7am to 5pm. These are recent figures from
Viacom’s DMCA takedown notices continue to generate controversy. The media giant fired off more than 100,000 notices to YouTube earlier this year, but it appears to have caught numerous legitimate videos in the crossfire. One of those clips, called “Stop the Falsiness,” satirizes comedian Stephen Colbert, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has filed a federal lawsuit against Viacom, asking the judge to declare the video non-infringing. Viacom says that it has looked through its records and can find no evidence that it issued a takedown notice for the clip in question. EFF attorney Jason Schultz stated that the offending clip was pulled from YouTube with the notice that it was “no longer available due to a copyright claim by Viacom International.” . This will continue to evolve in the coming weeks and months.

Google has taken a step in the right direction. Google said it had reached a deal with an independent label, Wind-up Records, to stream music videos and allow YouTube users to incorporate music tracks in their own videos, according to the New York Times. Content like lonely girl 15 proved you can create great independent content.

But YouTube says most of its licensing deals have been done quietly. It says it has firmed up more than 1,000 partnerships with content owners ranging from the Sundance Channel to small independent video producers, the Times reported. YouTube executives say the deals are a sign that a growing number of companies are becoming comfortable with displaying their content on the site, the Times reported. Industry analysts say in the Times that it is far easier for YouTube to persuade small media companies to license their content than it is to get NBC or Viacom Inc., two of Google’s vocal critics, to give up control of their most-prized content and the advertising revenue associated with it.
But most of the top social sites grow large by mistake, they just take off for one reason or another. The proposed NBC and Newscorp site which has been bandied about for over a year will if nothing else put significant roadblocks in Google’s path, while paving a way for those involved with Newco to give users and advertisers what they want from Online Video. But as always, concept is one thing, execution is the bottom line and it will probably have some form of locked down DRM and reflect very badly on the sites creators.

It will be interesting to see what happens next and what happens in the copyright world. I still think Google Lawyers will be a busy, busy bunch. I don’t think you can sue Google into oblivion, but as others have mentioned, if Google gets nailed one single time for copyright then the gates will open. I think there will be subpoenas to get the names of YouTube and Google Video users at some point in the future just like with P2P.
There is also a history of dumb acquisitions in the tech industry in 1999, Marc Cuban sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo for more than $5 billion. That was a ridiculous sum for a money losing company, but during the heyday of the Internet bubble, companies did deals to “acquire eyeballs.” Tech companies swore they would never repeat that mistake . Yahoo deserved what it wound up with which in this case wasn’t much. Cuban was smart to take the money and run. For the record, the people managing Yahoo were so clueless that they paid another $2.8 billion to buy Geo Cities the same year.

If the core competency of Google is to sell advertising and the foundation for the YouTube acquisition was to invent and deploy new and exciting forms of video advertising, that goal just took a huge hit. Hiring some folks away at Google for stupid money would seem to make a lot of sense at this point. From Google point of view the the 10 minute rule has to go, they need to take away the walled garden of indexing and returning results only for Google Video and YouTube. There are X million sites that contain video online . The good news for Google is that it may accelerate their ability to get deals done with people who don’t want to partner with Newco for whatever reason
For the TV and film studios. They are incredibly creative people when it comes to content, but very conservative and myopic when it comes to business models. They have made some good choices so far. Time will tell if they really get it and will do what is necessary to beat YouTube.
I’m the world’s biggest believer in online video. I watch shows on a computer screen every day like Rocket boom, Goodnight Burbank , and subscribe to 50 plus podcats all delivering excellent free well produced. These shows distributed free around the Internet to build the biggest and the widest distribution possible. But that’s one chosen business model. Viacom has theirs and Google has disregarded it.

I’m not a lawyer don’t fully grasp the arcane laws around the DMCA, or what the intricacies of Safe Harbor are all about. But what I do know is that Google’s YouTube is no hosting service. It’s not like an ISP, which simply allows customers to create their own servers and services. It’s actively filtering, actively allowing uploads, and making insane amounts of money off of the content that’s been uploaded. That’s not a hosting company, and I believe the courts will find that Viacom has been wronged, that Google has not done enough to protect the rights of copyright holders, and that Google owes Viacom. Google is screwing the small guy big time and Viacom can help prove it. If a Google Gmail users was distributing copies of Microsoft office from their Gmail storage it would be judged illegal immediately. They must respect the original owner.
Supporters may claim Google can make money from ads and Gmail signups and all the other things that go with that but in my own opinion the acquisition of YouTube a major strategic mistake that will take the bloom off of Google’s “Do No Evil” rose. If this goes to court all Viacom need to do in court is point to Napster and YouTube will loose a court battle immediately. Even worse Google has created the forest and invited the pirates to live there, regardless of differing people’s opinions on online content distribution. If Viacom does go to court Google will lose and loose big. If you cant pay to play for copyrighted material you should not be in the game, Bottom line is that Goo tube is a haven for pirates operating under Goo Tube cloak of respectability. The sad part is Google Video in particular makes it easy for people who could never figure out bit torrent or even know what it is in the first place to download videos.

Update: Whilst this case is still ongoing it looks as if Google will have to pay up. Viacom having proved that Google can block porn without manual filtering has won it’s case on copyrighted material.

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Google v Viacom an old post still ongoing court battle

Dvorak says on his blog that they should allow the videos to be uploded as it allows the stupid kids to get found out. Why should people be able to see the video? why cant YouTube do this police work and report to the police themselves.

YouTube have done allot of work on copyrighted material but still need to do more. They cant hide behind the DMCA forever, hopefully Viacom can prove this. YouTube has a moral obligation to block content like that below As once its posted it is up on the web forever. Google know this more than anyone. The same goes for any open access video site.

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Florida Teen Beating

Dvorak says on his blog that they should allow the videos to be uploded as it allows the stupid kids to get found out. Why should people be able to see the video? why cant YouTube do this police work and report to the police themselves.

YouTube have done allot of work on copyrighted material but still need to do more. They cant hide behind the DMCA forever, hopefully Viacom can prove this. YouTube has a moral obligation to block content like that below As once its posted it is up on the web forever. Google know this more than anyone. The same goes for any open access video site.

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Florida Teen Beating

According to The Register, the 24-year-old mother was arrested on March 28 and released on bail. The alleged rapists, aged 14 and 16, are now unlikely to face charges.

The video led to calls for YouTube to manually check all videos being uploaded to the site, with British MPs targeting YouTube over the incident. Adam Price MP said following the initial outrage that the video “surely shows [YouTube’s] system is completely inadequate.” The fake rape video had 600 views before being pulled by Google.

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Should YouTube manually check all videos?

The Google docs team has a real affinity for free-spirited types ( in their own words), and so they have spent allot of time thinking up ways to make Google Docs friendlier even to people on the go. If you’re one of those, you already know how you can access your Google Docs from anywhere, how nice it is to avoid having to email yourself files or back up docs with a thumbdrive, and how easily you can collaborate with others.

Whilst this is a welcome move, to claim that Google docs is in a position to replace MS Office in the enterprise is laughable at this point. Whilst the word processor is adequate the Excel clone is frankly laughable when compared with excel.

Dont get me wrong offline access is great but these tools are novelty rather than usefull at this point.

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Google docs Offline