Viacom Sues Google Over YouTube for $1 Billion 508
Snowgen writes "Viacom has filed a $1,000,000,000.00 lawsuit for 'massive intentional copyright infringement' against Google over YouTube video clips. '"YouTube's strategy has been to avoid taking proactive steps to curtail the infringement on its site," Viacom said in a statement. "Their business model, which is based on building traffic and selling advertising off of unlicensed content, is clearly illegal and is in obvious conflict with copyright laws.'"
Here's the PDF of the actual complaint ... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What the (Score:5, Informative)
Of course, in Youtube's favour, is the fact that the service clearly isn't intended as a vehicle for copyright infringement. Most of the material there is actually the home video stuff that the site is intended for, and they are making efforts to remove the material immediately.
Re:I predicted this a while ago (Score:3, Informative)
Not really..... (Score:3, Informative)
Fair use provisions don't just include small portions of the work. You have to be using the small portion of the work in a larger work. IE, commenting on a single passage in a book, using snippets from a press conference to create a parody of the press conference, showing a scene from a movie to teach the importance of lighting in setting the scene, etc. Just taking a small portion & displaying it by itself doesn't fall under fair use. Heck, the riff from Under Pressure was deemed not to be fair use when used in Ice Ice Baby and it's less than a dozen notes buried under the melody & words.
Where this should die a quick & horrible death for Viacom is that YouTube is following the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA & removing copyright material as soon as ViaCom presents them with the takedown notices. Whether Viacom likes it or not, what YouTube is doing is perfectly legal, so long as they continue to take down videos that Viacom advises them of.
Given that YouTube has code in place to reject reposts of videos they have already received takedown notices about, Viacom's argument that they are doing nothing to prevent the infringement is incorrect at best & argued in bad faith at the worst. (incorrect will loose them credibility for shoddy groundwork, bad faith will get the case tossed and possibly sanctioned into paying Google's legal fees)
Bankrupt? No. Buy? Unlikely but possible. (Score:3, Informative)
You're right that Google can't bankrupt Viacom via a lawsuit. Viacom is a big company with a reasonably strong balance sheet. Viacom's market cap is about $27B and Viacom has roughly $700M in cash and $7.65B in debt [yahoo.com]. No where near as strong a balance sheet as Google, but plenty to fund a big lawsuit. That said, Google has a market cap of $138B, $11.2B in cash and zero debt [yahoo.com]. Google would have to take on debt or do a stock swap to buy Viacom but since Google cash worth almost 50% of Viacom's market cap, Google could purchase Viacom if the deal was offered. I can't imagine Google doing this because it would be really stupid (IMO) for a lot of reasons but I'm just pointing out it is possible.
I know nothing of the particulars of this lawsuit but if I was a Google shareholder (I'm not) I would be worried. Even the most airtight lawsuit still can go the wrong way in front of a jury. I've never met a (responsible) lawyer who would claim there is better than a 90% chance of victory in any case. Google obviously knew Youtube was lawsuit bait when they bought them so they are potentially staking the entire enterprise on a lawsuit (or series of them) which doesn't strike me as responsible even if they think they are likely to prevail. If Google loses, Viacom will not be the last media company to sue Google. There is potentially a lot of upside for Google if they win but that is hardly assured. I suspect this will end up settled since both sides have a lot to lose if the lawsuit goes the wrong way and a lot to gain through cooperation.
Whatever happens it will be interesting to watch.