Viacom slaps Google with $1B YouTube lawsuit

Barry,

does that mean I should stop work on my distribution of a PDF form of your book? I'm not really making any money off of it. I mean $40.00 a book just covers expenses.

Bryon <><

NOTE: That was a joke. I'm not making a PDF version of your book and I dont have a Billion dollars, so please .... dont sue.
 
This is history repeating itself.

The studio system did everything it could to stop the distribution of magnetic tape (VCR) to the consumer. Jack Vallenti told congress “magnetic tape is to studios what Jack the Ripper was to a woman home alone.” What an idiot.

There’s so much irony here, first Viacom wanted to purchase Paramount studios but couldn’t make a credible enough offer until it purchased Blockbuster Video. The cash flow from a video rental business purchased one of the studios backing the law suite that would have prevented it from existing.

Then when Napster broke onto the scene the music industry, led by the same short sighted idiots tried to shut it down instead of trying to figure out a way to make money by managing the download transaction. They made the same argument regarding piracy, well you know what I’m not a thief nor are any of my friends. Piracy didn’t kill the music industry, greedy producers, very bad management and a little thing called the DVD (almost) did.

Do you really think if Viacom wins this lawsuit the “artists” whose work was downloaded will receive a penny? Just like VHS this lawsuit has nothing to do with protecting the artists rights and everything to do with protecting “Hollywood’s” market position. You can protect these pinheads if you want, but it’s not like Viacom couldn’t have filled a lawsuit against You Tube before Google purchased it. And its not like they didn’t know this was going to happen 10 YEARS AGO.

Companies like NEC, Alcatel and Infenera have developed third generation fiber products that can push 10 TRILLION bits per second down one strand of fiber. That’s about 1,900 CD’s, or 150 million simultaneous phone calls every second. Who do you think is investing in the development of this technology? Where do you think Ascent Media, Technicolor/Thomson, Kodak, Warner Bros, Viacom invests their R&D dollars?

You can burry your head in the major studios sand box if you want, but this lawsuit is not about protecting artists intellectual property. Plus to ad insult to injury, what do you think Google is going to do with Youtube? If they want to make it a successful place to conduct business one of the first things they have to do is start “Purchasing” content.

I think Viacom is trying to steal my $1 billion dollars and it pisses me off.
 
overlandfilms said:
You must not create content? Do you prescribe that copyright owners simply allow their intellectual property to slide into a free-for-all state of anarchy?
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Well i dont make movies like you guys, infact the more people that see my work for free is better... And Viacom actually owns a partner company of EGLN's so i probly should not be talking trash about them :tongue:
 
ChuckS said:
This is history repeating itself.

The studio system did everything it could to stop the distribution of magnetic tape (VCR) to the consumer. Jack Vallenti told congress “magnetic tape is to studios what Jack the Ripper was to a woman home alone.” What an idiot.

There’s so much irony here, first Viacom wanted to purchase Paramount studios but couldn’t make a credible enough offer until it purchased Blockbuster Video. The cash flow from a video rental business purchased one of the studios backing the law suite that would have prevented it from existing.

Then when Napster broke onto the scene the music industry, led by the same short sighted idiots tried to shut it down instead of trying to figure out a way to make money by managing the download transaction. They made the same argument regarding piracy, well you know what I’m not a thief nor are any of my friends. Piracy didn’t kill the music industry, greedy producers, very bad management and a little thing called the DVD (almost) did.


Do you really think if Viacom wins this lawsuit the “artists” whose work was downloaded will receive a penny? Just like VHS this lawsuit has nothing to do with protecting the artists rights and everything to do with protecting “Hollywood’s” market position. You can protect these pinheads if you want, but it’s not like Viacom couldn’t have filled a lawsuit against You Tube before Google purchased it. And its not like they didn’t know this was going to happen 10 YEARS AGO.

Companies like NEC, Alcatel and Infenera have developed third generation fiber products that can push 10 TRILLION bits per second down one strand of fiber. That’s about 1,900 CD’s, or 150 million simultaneous phone calls every second. Who do you think is investing in the development of this technology? Where do you think Ascent Media, Technicolor/Thomson, Kodak, Warner Bros, Viacom invests their R&D dollars?

You can burry your head in the major studios sand box if you want, but this lawsuit is not about protecting artists intellectual property. Plus to ad insult to injury, what do you think Google is going to do with Youtube? If they want to make it a successful place to conduct business one of the first things they have to do is start “Purchasing” content.

I think Viacom is trying to steal my $1 billion dollars and it pisses me off.
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well said
 
I agree with ChuckS. These are companies that would rather fight change than work with it.

Now I may be wrong about this, so feel free to correct me, but I beleive that I heard, as an example, car companies that aren't adapting to the new changes are starting to lose profit big time. They aren't developping hybrid cars and they're falling behind. If a company doesn't learn to adapt and change with time, then they might as well just give up.

It's unfortunate though. Take a look at blockbusters no more late fees as another example. Most video rental companies make most of their profit from late fees, and the small home businesses can't eliminate their late fees or else they'll lose too much profit and have to shut down. But if they continue the way they do then blockbuster will run them out of business anyways. I'm sure this will apply to the entertainment industry as well.

I forgot what it was, but you can now rent things online, make a list, and when you're done you just put it back in the mail and they send you a new one. This is a great example of a company adapting to the new times. People want to be able to view their content when they want and where they want. Television companies should be realizing this as well.

Some television companies are starting to put their content online. I think it was CBS. I had missed an episode of Jericho and tried to find it on youtube to only find that youtube had taken them all off by request of CBS, and so I went onto CBS where they are also showing the full episodes... to find that they don't allow people outside of the US to view the content... which defeats the whole purpose IMO.

Where do I stand on the whole lawsuit? I think it's wrong to make money off other people's content, however this lawsuit will only cause more problems than it solves IMO.
 
Actually I am confused by your comments Chuck. This does not parallel the videotape controversy; Viacom is not trying to shut down the internet or stop people from using FLV, MPG, MOV, etc files. They are trying to stop people from sharing their copyrighted material. YouTube is making profits from people viewing the copyrighted material while owners of the copyrighted material are losing money to people who view, let's say the latest episode of '24,' on Youtube instead of on TV. Less TV viewership means commercials pay less money.

They are completely justified in their actions and heck yes it makes sense for them to first attack the person who is doing it the most, making the most profit from it, and doing it the most openly.

We all knew this lawsuit was coming. The big distributors may be slow in making their shows available on-line but they are moving quicker then the record companies did. In that you have to give them credit, they learn from the record companies mistakes.

Google could be doing a better job of monitoring for copyrighted cotent. Basically hire a staff of people to review anything posted that gets, let's say, over 1,000 hits. When someone just wholesale steals a movie or episode from TV it's pretty obvious. The remainder of the "lessor offense (someone stealing a DVXUser's short) can be handled by cease and desist requests by the copyright holder.

It's all ready possible to watch whatever you want whenever you want with Tivo and a Slingshot. You have to pay a bit for that service and in time it will be possible to do it for really cheap. Until then it is not the copyright holders responsibility to make it simple and cheap for you. It is in their best financial interests to do so, so they will. Stealing from them until they catch up is no excuse.

My $.02
 
I haven't checked lately, but how does Youtube make money?

The consumer doesn't pay for the download, Google doesn't charge to host it and do you have any idea how many searches are performed on Google every month? 2.7 BILLION, you'd need the population of China to monitor what's being uploaded and the technology does not yet exist that could contectually determine whether its copyrighted material.

Don't get me wrong, I'm very much against piracy but that's not what this lawsuit is about. I'd also be willing to bet that the ratings on any of the shows that are downloaded on Youtube have gone up, not down. The big distributors are not slow, they are decietful. They could have stopped Youtube way before Google purchased it but they didn't. They haven't learned anything from the music industry, they have no vision for the future, no real idea of how distribution will work and are taking almost exactly the same steps as the record companies did.

Many broadcasters are putting their content online, my wife watches Heros online. They are also desperately trying to figure out how to make money on Youtube and Myspace. I think it was CBS who is offering money to people who have footage from March madnness.

The problem confronting studios today is that they no longer control the distribution channels, the consumer does. If they continue to fight against what the consumer wants they will become irrelevent.
 
We (consumers) are served to advertisers. That's how money is made ... through the money generated from advertisers.

Google bought YT as a business investment and advertising avenue. Millions of people access it everyday... the more people Google can access. Who knows how things work behind the doors of YT? The videos popped up in those "automated" top rated and top viewed categories may very well be controlled (just my cynistic speculation).
But nonetheless, YT has access to millions of people daily, and it's either an advertising possibility that Google will take advantage of in the future, or just a way to store user data into their databases and sell to advertising firms. Remember, everything we do online is surveillanced, no matter what. When we log in, we are tracked. When we click on certain videos, that is tracked (and calculated, stored, and averaged). So advertisers can now see what users are interested online... which Google can now tap into and provide.

Copyright is fickle and futile online. It's so open for infringement, that the only way to really crack down is to use surveillance technology that can easily track copyright infringement, and set up an organization to pursue EVERY single person who decides to post something that is protected. Of course, this is unlikely with the millions of users who do it everyday across the globe. so it seems now the corporations who are not benefiting from this new insurgence of uploading will only attack the sources like YT. It will be a ping pong of lawsuits, as it becomes "natural" for users to access everything for free online. Like ChuckS said, they have no clue what they are doing. Everyone is scrambling to see how money can be made from these sites like YT. Apparently, myspace generates a **** load of advertising revenue. Before it was one way and easy for them to control copyright'd material, but now their ****ed as we begin to take control (or we like to think so!) ****ers. :)

Personally, I enjoy this new freedom of getting to watch shows broadcasters put up any time I want. And as quality only gets better over the years, this will become one of the main forms of distribution for broadcasters. Oh how I love the Internet.
 
Good question on how YouTube makes money. Right now they have some modest banner ads. I have read they have a long term plan involving building brand loyalty at the moment and working towards a bigger payoff later. I imagine the banner ads are making them a modest profit when weighed against operating cost. But that is all just guessing on my part.

I also don't know how many videos are uploaded everyday but it is certainly less then the number of google searches :) . The point was you could find a modest compromise on what videos are checked for copyright infringement depending on the number of hits the video receives.

They are developing a "audio fingerprint" program that can identify copyrighted songs within a video. They could probably apply a similar technology to identify copyrighted video material. The processing power to check all the uploaded videos against a huge and constantly growing database would be tremendous though.

I really have no clue about Viacom's "true" motivations or vision for the future but, to me, the central point is they are protecting that which is theirs. Profit is certainly a huge part of their motivations but who cares. The programing is theirs to decide what to do with. You can't "liberate" some piece of art just because you decide the owner doesn't deserve their pay day.

As far as the suing Google, I don't believe (but could be wrong) they are trying to make money by getting money from Google but, in fact, using the lawsuit to get Google/YouTube to change how they check for copyrighted material.

All this talk about keeping up with technology is just fog covering the central point of theft. Of course the stealing will continue no matter what but when a large corporation becomes complicite in the action they should be restrained.

Cheers
 
ChuckS said:
This is history repeating itself.

The studio system did everything it could to stop the distribution of magnetic tape (VCR) to the consumer. Jack Vallenti told congress “magnetic tape is to studios what Jack the Ripper was to a woman home alone.” What an idiot.

There’s so much irony here, first Viacom wanted to purchase Paramount studios but couldn’t make a credible enough offer until it purchased Blockbuster Video. The cash flow from a video rental business purchased one of the studios backing the law suite that would have prevented it from existing.

Then when Napster broke onto the scene the music industry, led by the same short sighted idiots tried to shut it down instead of trying to figure out a way to make money by managing the download transaction. They made the same argument regarding piracy, well you know what I’m not a thief nor are any of my friends. Piracy didn’t kill the music industry, greedy producers, very bad management and a little thing called the DVD (almost) did.

Do you really think if Viacom wins this lawsuit the “artists” whose work was downloaded will receive a penny? Just like VHS this lawsuit has nothing to do with protecting the artists rights and everything to do with protecting “Hollywood’s” market position. You can protect these pinheads if you want, but it’s not like Viacom couldn’t have filled a lawsuit against You Tube before Google purchased it. And its not like they didn’t know this was going to happen 10 YEARS AGO.

Companies like NEC, Alcatel and Infenera have developed third generation fiber products that can push 10 TRILLION bits per second down one strand of fiber. That’s about 1,900 CD’s, or 150 million simultaneous phone calls every second. Who do you think is investing in the development of this technology? Where do you think Ascent Media, Technicolor/Thomson, Kodak, Warner Bros, Viacom invests their R&D dollars?

You can burry your head in the major studios sand box if you want, but this lawsuit is not about protecting artists intellectual property. Plus to ad insult to injury, what do you think Google is going to do with Youtube? If they want to make it a successful place to conduct business one of the first things they have to do is start “Purchasing” content.

I think Viacom is trying to steal my $1 billion dollars and it pisses me off.
Click to expand...

Chuck,

What I'm speaking to is the global erosion of the power of copyright. Think of my argument not as one of advocacy for the people who want to parade around with photos of aborted fetuses, but for their right to do so.

Please don't confuse that statement as one of politics - it's strictly an illustration of how I might be made out to advocate for Viacom when I am not a fan of theirs or the way they treat their artists in most circumstances.

The truth is, our rights as artists and creators are being diluted, diminished or simply ignored completely through unregulated, unchallenged infractions. I can go sue individuals for each infraction or I can sue the powerful at the top and watch the results trickle down.

Viacom tried for months to negotiate a deal that would address the concerns over uncompensated use of their intellectual property. As in the case of Napster, there was no compromise on the part of the distributor (defendant) with respect to the regulation and protection of the plaintiffs materials.

This leaves people like Steven Spielberg with little recourse but to underwrite the development of, and advocate for, technologies like self-destructing videodiscs (recall his push for the original DIVX?).

Is Spielberg evil, Chuck?

I think he was coming at this in a creative way, but the way it made me feel was that he didn't trust me, the consumer, with a temporary loan-out of his materials. That's a tough position for an artist to be in. Most creators are not subsidized in the way YouTube or Google are. We do not have billions of dollars at our disposal to lobby, prosecute, invent, patent and deploy against the threat of those who would ignore the various and sundry regulations that protect our intellectual properties.

It is unfortunate, but Viacom is closer to my side on this particular day and I hope they crush Google on this point. Before you get too sentimental, recall that these are the same guys who cower at the feet of power in Red China - selling their users down the proverbial river.

They wouldn't cry for you - it's all business and they make more money at this than you can imagine.

e
 
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Good points Erik.

These are complicated issues, technology is playing a role in reshaping our world and I believe the entertainment industry is doing everything in its power to prevent it. I'm just not sure who the pirate is?

We all know that just because you can download content for free doesn't mean you should. And just because I can doesn't mean I will. Regarding Napster it was the plaintiff that was unrelenting. There was no level of security that Napster could implement that the music industry would except. I believe this is at the root of the problem.

Don't you think that if Viacom could have developed Youtube it would have? Anytime technology enables a new distribution channel the MPAA marches lockstep with the entertainment industry to prevent it from happening. They will not allow anyone outside of the industry to control a potential revenue stream that could potentially open them up to greater competition, after all they control 100% of the current infrastructure and they have become very adept at hiding behind the threat of "piracy."

When cell phone bills where north of $100 a month my cell phone was clones [pirated] at least three times a year. When wireless companies made it affordable, 1000 for $39 the piracy stopped [except in the case of terrorists]. Hollywood doesn't want you to have the ability to download, purchase, distribute content in any form all the while they raise the ticket price at the box office to $15.

If Viacom wins, we lose. Not for long though because Mytube, Theirtube or whatever you want to call it, will start-up somewhere else - because Google didn't create it, we did [the consumer] And the reason is because a huge vacuum has been created between the technology that the consumer wants to view the content on and Hollywood's reluctance or inability to provide it. Do you know how many movies were produced this year that were eligible for an Academy Award nomination? Do you know what that number was 10 or 20 years ago? Those numbers are within 10% of each other. Why do you think that is?

The problem for Hollywood is that they have lagged way behind the technology curve while other markets have embraced new technologies to grow their market share. India, England, and other producing countries have not gated their production to the point where Hollywood probably produces less than 10% of the Worlds content. As I said earlier it is quickly becoming irrelevant.
 
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