March 13, 2007 6:35 AM PDT
Viacom sues Google over YouTube clips
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The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, contends that nearly 160,000 unauthorized clips of Viacom's entertainment programming have been available on YouTube and that these clips have been viewed more than 1.5 billion times. (PDF: Viacom's complaint.)
Viacom, an entertainment giant that owns Paramount Pictures, DreamWorks and a number of cable channels, said it has also asked the court for an injunction to halt the alleged copyright infringement.
"YouTube appropriates the value of creative content on a massive scale for YouTube's benefit without payment or license," Viacom said in its complaint. "YouTube's brazen disregard of the intellectual-property laws fundamentally threatens not just plaintiffs but the economic underpinnings of one of the most important sectors of the United States economy."
The lawsuit represents a serious escalation in the conflict with YouTube, and it is also the most significant legal challenge over intellectual-property rights to video sharing's No. 1 site. But some industry observers doubt that this will embolden other entertainment companies to mount their own court challenges.
Google downplayed the legal challenge and extolled the benefits to content creators that it sees in YouTube.
"We have not received the lawsuit but are confident that YouTube has respected the legal rights of copyright holders and believe the courts will agree," Google said in a statement. "YouTube is great for users and offers real opportunities to rights holders: the opportunity to interact with users; to promote their content to a young and growing audience; and to tap into the online-advertising market. We will certainly not let this suit become a distraction to the continuing growth and strong performance of YouTube and its ability to attract more users (and) more traffic, and (to) build a stronger community."
Google, which acquired YouTube last October for $1.65 billion, recognized the possibility that the video site would one day be forced to wage lengthy court battles. The company has reportedly set aside a sum of money to fund legal costs.
Meanwhile, Google has successfully negotiated licensing deals with many entertainment companies, including Warner Music Group, CBS and most recently, the BBC.
Some advocacy groups suggested that the "fair use" doctrine of copyright law, which allows the noncommercial reproduction of works for purposes like criticism, comment, news reporting and research, should protect YouTube users that post short clips or mainstream-media works.
"Simply (defining material as) 'unauthorized' does not make its use illegal," Gigi Sohn, president of the advocacy group Public Knowledge, said in a statement.
"I don't think this is the start of a whole series of litigation," said Edward Naughton, intellectual-property partner at Holland & Knight. "I think this is Viacom and Google in a negotiation that hasn't gone so smoothly, so it has gone to litigation...Viacom is just really turning up the heat."
Although legitimate copyright concerns come into play, Viacom's action is "probably about a large company that would prefer the old status quo, where they had most of the control (over their content distribution), and they didn't cede it to companies like YouTube and Google," said Jeffrey Lindgren, an intellectual-property lawyer at Morgan Miller Blair in San Francisco.
"I would expect some (suits from other companies to) follow," he added, "but I don't know (that) this is really going to lead to the onslaught that is the end of Google and YouTube."
An NBC Universal representative declined to comment Tuesday on whether the company has plans for litigation against YouTube similar to that of Viacom. Twentieth Century Fox Film spokesman Chris Alexander, meanwhile, said the Viacom complaint is far more sweeping than any action his company has pursued against the video-sharing site.
Earlier this year, the News Corp. unit subpoenaed YouTube for the identities of two users who had allegedly posted as-yet-unaired episodes of the popular show 24 because it was "interested in protecting full episodes of our series that we have yet to monetize," he said.
"We take protection of our copyrights very seriously, and we look at them on a case-by-case basis," Alexander said, but he added that he was unaware of any companywide policy governing clips, as opposed to entire episodes, posted to video-sharing sites.
Viacom last month caused a stir by demanding that YouTube remove 100,000 infringing clips. Some observers shrugged, calling it a negotiating tactic by Viacom and predicted that the two would eventually become partners.
Nonetheless, Viacom says in its complaint that YouTube failed to prevent its users from posting pirated material to the site. San Bruno, Calif.-based YouTube will remove clips that feature unauthorized material only after it receives a takedown notice from the copyright holder, Viacom said.
This, many entertainment executives say, is unfair. YouTube's policy, which the company says complies with copyright law, forces many of the biggest studios to devote time and money toward policing someone else's site. Often, no sooner than a company asks YouTube to take down a clip, users post a new version of the same clip.
"YouTube has deliberately chosen not to take reasonable precautions to deter the rampant infringement on its site," Viacom said in its complaint. "Because YouTube directly profits from the availability of popular infringing works on its site, it has decided to shift the burden entirely onto copyright owners to monitor the YouTube site on a daily or hourly basis to detect infringing videos.
A source inside Viacom said the company would likely have not filed suit, had it not repeatedly found clips that it had already asked to be taken down.
"More and more of the company's resources are going to this," the source said. "The company basically is paying for an entire new department to watch YouTube."
Google lawyers said they are relying on a 1998 law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to shield them from liability. One provision of that statute generally says companies are off the hook if they remove copyrighted content promptly when it is brought to their attention.
Internet services may only benefit from that so-called "safe harbor" if they also meet a four-pronged test. Those conditions include not being "aware of facts or circumstances from which infringing activity is apparent" and not receiving "financial benefit directly attributable to the infringing activity."
Viacom in its complaint argues Google and YouTube do not qualify for that relief, but Glenn Brown, an in-house product counsel for the merged companies, said he was confident their actions were on solid legal ground. "We meet those requirements and go above and beyond them in helping content providers identify copyright infringements," he said in a telephone interview Tuesday afternoon.
YouTube was also expected late last year to release a technology that would automatically weed out copyright content from the site. NBC's Zucker and others in Hollywood have accused the company of dragging its feet. Viacom said that only when an agreement is reached will YouTube begin safeguarding an entertainment company's copyright property.
"YouTube has deliberately withheld the application of available copyright protection measures in order to coerce rights holders to grant it licenses on favorable terms," according to the complaint.
CNET News.com's Elinor Mills contributed to this report.
See more CNET content tagged:
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Google Inc.,
intellectual property
about when asked?
Its all about what can I take from you. period. Google has already negoiated with several companies, Viacom just wants too much money for nothing.
Lawsuits used to be a way to redress wrongs. Now they are used for everything else, politics, creating Spin, pure greed, you name it.
Ben Franklin had it right. "First we shoot all the lawyers..." :-)
EN
There is a bigger story here... but will CNET get to it first?
The suspense is killing me... (* CHUCKLE )*
FWIW
Youtube is a good website and I honestly believe it can do without the Mainstream Media junk. This is just an arm-twisting tactic to make a deal with youtube.
Hey google for one day disable all those hollywood studios searches and blame it on a glitch. I love it when tech companies pay back this studio fat cats.
If the answer to rule one is yes, one does not need to even consider points 2 through 10 which deal with trivialities like whether anyone was harmed. The prospect of having a "jury of peers" consisting of housewives and retired sanitation workers (both honorable professions) located in Viacom's home town to make a decision on a billion dollar windfall to their local company would seem to motivate Google to consider a nuisance payment.
Of course, then everyone who has a home video on YouTube would ask for their piece of the action so one hopes that Qoogle is employing squads of lawyers to keep their company. Of course all of funds spent on attorneys against attorneys would never have been put to better use -- like new product development or hiring the best and the brightest.
A mediocre lawyer can beat a great techie hands down, any day!
Youtube and myspace are human garbage collections on the Internet.
I hope they win.....it could not happen to a better company.....save maybe Sony.
Idiots.
neighbours stuff, and then said, "Look, all you had to say is that
you want it back..." YouTube is knowingly engaging in theft, hoping
that most companies and people won't know it's actually been
stolen.
First off if you steal your neighbors stuff, they don't have it anymore. When a video is on youtube, the owner still has the video as well.
Secondly, users upload videos to youtube, so to go with your analogy, it would be like some unknown third party making a copy of your neighbors stuff then giving it to you.
The only thing youtube is knowingly engaging in is hosting videos from unkown third party sources.
viacom has used this method plenty of times to their approval, so it'll be hard for them to claim that now, all of a sudden, youtube is engaging in blatant copyright infringement.
Making thousands of programmers and engineers Robin hood will only bring about your down fall.And add to fare use debate. Viacom is fighting their drug copyright war and this will be lost.
Suppose Viacom won all their terms and You tube was shut down. Well guess what folks -- the Internet moves on with or without YouTube, and media pirates will find a new home to collaborate all their stashes with each other and you can rest assured someone somewhere will find a way to profit off it. And worse yet, after all this litigation time, money, and other resources are wasted, and absolutely nothing has been accomplished.
While it can be said that the Internet has largely taken intellectual property hostage, such is the reality of the information age. Whether or not it has been intentionally designed that way is debatable, but one thing is for sure: we're all going to have to adapt to it eventually.
YouTube should have been sued long time back so that that process would have started much earlier.
It is only thanks to extremely recent changes in the United States 200+ year-old copyright-laws... that EVERYTHING is now AUTOMATICALLY copyrighted. Before that, only those items that were, specifically, intentionally copyrighted were locked-away from general public-use, for any length of time, at all.
Additionally, originally, copyright was only supposed to last about 7-years. Again, it was only fairly recently, that the amount of time that a copyright lasts... has actually been extended to a period, literally, longer than any, current American... will live.
Also, ONLY unique-works, in their general entirety, were supposed to be protected by "copyright"... "Clips", "excerpts", and "parodies" were, and still are, supposed to be specifically exempted... by LAW.
And "copyright", by the original concept of those that created it, was supposed to be a civil-matter. Whereby, it IS the copyright-holders responsibility, no one elses, to protect THEIR copyright-interests. That too, was only recently changed, at the Federal-level.
And finally, so-called "common-carriers" WERE "exempt"... right up until "Sony Betamax" was, effectively, completely-overturned... after nearly twenty years of lobbying, manipulation, and pay-offs, by the entertainment-industry. Even now, defenders of the "DMCA" continually tout the, clearly-illusory "safe harbor" provisions. However, it HAS been PROVEN, time and again, that these, alleged, "protections" are, in reality, nothing more than a BOGUS-SHAM.
Now, certain big-money interests would have you believe that, literally, every-single -burble- which arises from the depths of their clearly insanely-greedy, and wholly-corrupt, guts... is, for some indefinable reason, ABSOLUTELY THEIRS... FOREVER... Further, they actually demand that every American accept that, in order to preserve civilization as we know it, it is ABSOLUTELY EVERYONE ELSES night-and-day responsibility to actively prevent anyone from, so much as even thinking about, "violating" their WILDEST FANTASIES of virtually ROYAL-OWNERSHIP of "art" and "information".
Frankly, in my opinion, the "pendulum" of, so-called, "intellectual-property" law hasnt simply swung too far. It has actually swung so far... that the weight has flown-off... rolled across the floor... and dropped, almost irretrievably, down the grate.
Or, maybe, I maybe Im just completely-wrong in thinking that we should, as a nation, try to balance the WHIMS of business, with the RIGHTS of the citizens...
Silly me...
protection for the author, to some bull--it --ck-me statement that
whatever an author produces is owned by anyone BUT the author.
I really hate people like you. Create your own ---ng content from
now on.
won't. People won't boycott either company and in the case of
Viacom, why should they? Google is showing their video without
paying for it.
And the truth of the matter is that if content companies go after
individuals who download "music", why should Google be
exempt when they're actually using the content in money
making website, unlike the majority of ordinary people who have
downloaded music?
Personally, I say go at them in full force and nail them to the
wall. Unfortunately, I'm sure Viacom will somehow let it go, or
it'll be some stupid Viacom-Google deal that'll go pretty much
nowhere (kind of like the Google-Sun deal?).
Charles R. Whealton
Charles Whealton @ pleasedontspam.com
- To Viacom.....
-
by robertz1200
March 14, 2007 8:11 AM PDT
- ...... GET A GRIP and back off morons.
-
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