viacom v. youtube/google

Continuing with the copyright theme...

Pretty much everyone predicted that Google would get sued once they purchased YouTube. No one bothered to sue You Tube before they were bought because there was no money to be earned. But now that Google owns them, there's a lot of money at stake.

From a purely legal standpoint, I think that Viacom is in the right. YouTube is streaming thousands of copyrighted videos a day. I'm not sure if they are making money off advertising yet, but it's not a far stretch of the imagination to imagine them making a ton of money off of advertising.

One of GooTube's defenses is that they remove copyrighted videos when they are discovered or reported. So essentially their defense is that "it's only illegal if we get caught, and if we get caught, we'll stop doing it."

But legalities aside, it really is in Viacom's best interest to have their videos on You Tube. 99% of the things I watch on YouTube I would never watch anywhere else - it's not like if I watch a clip of some Comedy Central show on YouTube it prevents me from watching it directly on Comedy Central, because I was never going to watch it in the first place. But sometimes I actually do end up watching an actual TV show because of something I saw on YouTube. YouTube is basically free advertising. Certainly Viacom already realizes that.

I think the main reason for the lawsuit is that Viacom is jealous - if people were going to their websites to view these clips, then they would make the money off of advertising. But the fact is that it's highly unlikely that their website will ever get the amount of traffic YouTube is getting...

Normally I would guess that this would be settled out of court, with some sort of agreement where Viacom gets 10% of any ad revenue generated on copyrighted videos (which is a sweet deal for them because they aren't paying any bandwidth or development costs). But Google has historically been very stubborn, and they don't change their policies for anyone (well, except for maybe the Chinese government). So we'll have to see what happens...