Viacom Demands YouTube Remove Videos 225
AlHunt writes "According to the folks at PCWorld Viacom has publicly scolded YouTube for continuing to host throngs of Viacom videos without permission. They are demanding that over 100,000 of its clips be removed from the site. This includes content from Comedy Central (no more Daily Show), MTV, Nick at Nite, Nickelodeon, Paramount Pictures, and VH1. YouTube has acknowledged receiving a DMCA request from Viacom, and the article notes what a dire precedent this could be if Google can't reach an agreement with Viacom and its fellow IP holders."
Bad for Viacom (Score:5, Insightful)
Since i know people are thinking it... (Score:5, Insightful)
because someone will re-upload those clips whether Viacom likes it or not.
OTOH, I understand why GooTube doesn't want to piss off the big players in the media industry & will eventually compromise in one way or another.
Viacom has rights (Score:4, Insightful)
Dear Viacom (Score:5, Insightful)
Sincerely,
YouTube
Who needs YouTube to get The Daily Show (Score:2, Insightful)
Could've been worse (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Dear Viacom (Score:5, Insightful)
Our business model is to provide content which is trivially easy for people to duplicate and distribute, but to sue anyone who actually does that. You are next on our hit list.
Plan A was to take control of all the hardware in the world away from its rightful owners, but that didn't work out so well. This has left us with no alternative but to sue you and everyone else.
Sincerely,
Viacom
You don't. (Score:5, Insightful)
Reaching agreement with the big media companies might make reduce YouTube's workload and reduce news stories such as this one. But it's absolutely not necessary.
Re:You don't. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:You don't. (Score:3, Insightful)
Viacom is being stupid (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The takedown is already happening... (Score:1, Insightful)
The sad thing about YouTube... (Score:1, Insightful)
I've seen some wonderful original videos on YouTube but it's also taken weeks of searching to find them and I've only found about ten. The search engine is only good when you know the title of what you are looking for, and that's only true with illegal uploads. The most viewed ranking is useless because people watch videos because they think they might be good much more often than they watch them because they know they are good. The video ratings are useless unless your preferences are exactly the same as an average person. So the result is, even if you want to use YouTube for what it was intended for, it's still a hundred times easier to use it illegally.
The ugly truth (Score:5, Insightful)
The Internet is the problem (Score:4, Insightful)
There may be consequences for youtube but perhaps the proverbial cat is out of the figurative bag. The real problem here is that the Internet is such an effective and efficient distribution system. I find myself watching more and more news content on youtube simply because it's there when I want it. I don't have to read a program guide or program a TV. I don't even have to own a TV.
If what happened after Napster [wikipedia.org] (as a file-sharing service) was shut-down is any indication, the forces of supply and demand combined with the ubiquity and amorphous characteristics of the Internet are unstoppable, even if youtube were shut down tomorrow, you could expect to see the Daily Show popping up more prevalently on P2P, BitTorrent, or some obscure Russian site.
And if the failure of all those DMCA P2P lawsuits to stop file-sharing from reaching an all-time high is any indication of the world in which we live, people are going to get the content one way or another, no matter what the copyright holders or the law says. All moral judgments aside, that just a fact based in reality.
1) No. 2) It's a negotiating tactic. (Score:3, Insightful)
You know, that simply doesn't reflect how the economy works. If I put up a cinema, there's no reason, moral, legal or otherwise, why you shouldn't open up a restaurant next door and make a profit from the customers I draw. True, you have no positive right to do so, but there's no restriction on such activity either. Do you want to live in a world in which companies and individuals can control all positive externalities of their actions? As Lemley [ssrn.com] explains, monopolies are the best way to achieve that kind of control. The pernicious idea that copyright confers an exclusive right to profits (both direct and indirect) is at variance with almost all other market activity.
Where on earth does this come from? Market economies and the labor theory of value are a modern phenomena. Most societies in history have been organized quite differently, with vastly different conceptions of property and ownership. (Your claim preceeds the earliest writing by thousands of years!)
If you ask me, Viacom's action is a negotiating tactic. They know they benefit from the distribution of their programing. But they also know there's money to be made here, so they want as big a cut as possible. Both sides are in a contest to determine how to divide up the pie - which really comes down to a question of relative strength and weakness, not right and wrong.
Re:You don't. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:You don't. (Score:3, Insightful)
Every business on the planet has to face these kinds of cost-benefit issues and regulations. Drug companies. Car companies. Light bulb manufacturers. Oil refineries. Ford isn't allowed to sell unsafe cars just because it's hard and expensive to make safe cars. SmithKlein can't sell untested drugs just because it's astronomically costly to get FDA approval. Exxon can't dump waste into the ocean since it is difficult to contain their byproducts. GE can't sell lights that catch fire even though it requires constant checking and rechecking to ensure quality and safety.
Google could do as you suggest and staff a team of reviewers. Or they could require payment of service + real identification and when some putz uploads the latest American Idol, Fox could go and brutalize the idiot in court, having gotten the offender's name and address from Google.
Personally I don't think the value of the non-infringing material is so great as to justify the harm done to content producers. Either Google solves this or they should break out the checkbook.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Drop them (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:You don't. (Score:4, Insightful)
The difference is, I think, that Napster's main purpose was to distribute copyrighted music; non-copyrighted stuff was the exception not the rule. YouTube's main purpose is to distribute bad karaoke videos and other things in the same vein, but happens to have people posting copyrighted material.