Viacom responds on YouTube lawsuit | Hacker News Reader

Viacom responds on YouTube lawsuit

viacom.com

18 pointsnanexcool22 comments

From Viacom: By their own admission, the site contained "truckloads" of infringing content and founder Steve Chen explained that YouTube needed to "steal" videos because those videos make "our traffic soar."

If true, that's pretty damning.

From Viacom: These facts are undisputed. The statements by Google regarding Viacom activities are merely red herrings and have no relevance on the legal facts of this case.

Um, really?

From Google: For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site. It deliberately "roughed up" the videos to make them look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube accounts using phony e-mail addresses. It even sent employees to Kinko's to upload clips from computers that couldn't be traced to Viacom.

So let's make an analogy. You keep calling the cops to say that I'm stealing your stuff - and I am! But secretly, you're also hiring people to carry your stuff to my house and leave it in my yard.

But that has "no relevance on the legal facts of this case"? The fact that you're framing someone shouldn't affect their trial?

That's just crazy.

This reads worse than a -50 comment on Reddit.

Also, fuck you Viacom. Look at the most popular videos on YouTube -- all user-produced. A haven of copyright infringement, or a haven of not needing you anymore? I'll bet on the second one.

But you do have to confess that a lot of YouTube is "copyright-theft". The real question is what effect that "theft" has on the bottom line of the companies that hold the rights. Is it 1:1, 1:100 or can it/does it result in additional profit in some cases?

Nobody really knows the answer to this and anyone who states they do is just guessing.

Fair use, you mean.

I have never seen a full TV episode of a popular show on YouTube. But the file sharing sites have them, and in HD, and without ads and annotations. Guess where I get my full TV episodes from. Not Youtube.

I've watched PLENTY of full series on YouTube. However I don't watch so much mainstream.

You can still catch the latest English Premier League or Champions League action if you get there quick enough (in before the lock).

IIRC all of the Naruto (Anime) subs used to be up there and they were licensed to Viz Media.

They're much better at removing the stuff then they used to be but say three or so years ago YouTube was stuffed with full episodes. I remember watching almost all of "Everybody Hates Chris" on YouTube.

I watch full episodes of poker shows. Broken up into 10 minute clips of course. In the "old days" I watched full clips of the daily show and countless other shows I can't even remember now. I didn't have a TV and didn't need one because Youtube had all the shows I wanted to see.

I watched "air crash investigation" a few times. Since I didn't know this show existed, the existence of the clips was helpful to them in the form of free advertising.

Of course, I don't have cable or whatever, so I just download the episodes from real file sharing sites. But you can't blame Youtube for that, that's all on me.

No, there wasn't much user generated material at the beginning. I remember when I discovered youtube, I was shocked that how they were allowed to put so much copyrighted material online without any problem.

If it weren't for the high production value content, I'd argue Youtube would never have gotten as popular as it did.

I'm increasingly dismayed by how in our society we reward this kind of illegal behavior, whether you agree that it is moral, unethical, or whatever, it is against the law and repeatedly, these violations are accepted, promoted, and lead the owners of the sites to $300+ Million exits.

And then I remember where the U.S. got its land. I remember where Goodyear got his rubber. I remember where oil and diamonds and rare metals come from and wonder why we have laws at all. Why we have national borders at all. Why we have jails at all.

Yeah it's tempting to go after Viacom, News Corp etc., and as wrong as I think they are, I can't help feeling all this is just a symptom of a far bigger problem at a completely different level of abstraction. Edit for clarification: I agree with you that if we have laws we should follow them, but law should reflect culture not vice versa.

I'm not sure I'm with you on the production quality video necessity. A lot of youtubes virality has been stupid cat videos. While I'm sure there are people logging on and looking for naruto, I would bet most people don't find youtube for the first time searching for Naruto.

YouTube almost certainly hand-pick the most popular videos to deliberately avoid the crapton of music videos which are the only ones that don't generally suck.

Fuck google! Music videos dominate the most popular youtube videos, so I don't know why you're saying they are all user-produced. Milly Cirrus has 2 in the top 10. It's right there on their own page for crying out loud, do you even know what you are talking about or are you just one of the countless content theft fanboys?

http://www.youtube.com/videos?lg=EN&s=mp&t=a

I hope the courts throw the book at Google. I'm so sick of their holier than thou attitude while they take content and do whatever they want and make money hand over fist for doing it. They knowingly break the law and then use their clout to get content creators to succumb to their demands.

Until we take a stand against this kind of behavior, it will continue.

Either stop the behavior or change the laws so it isn't only big corporations who can get away with it. They sue the pants off individuals in their homes with some computers hooked up to the internet, but Google does exactly the same thing and expect people to pay them for it.

What really is the difference here between a file sharer with some songs on their computer and Google with those exact same songs on youtube? Why is the law different for google than it is for Jane Internet User?

Factor in the long tail. Do you think most views on youtube are not user-produced then?

Milly Cirrus has an advantage when competing with user-generated content because she has an expensive publicist.

The Miley Cyrus videos are most likely licensed as well. It's really not difficult for record companies to take this stuff down if they want to: hire an intern at $8/hr to do searches for your top 50 artists and report the videos to youtube (they are pretty damn responsive). Bam, problem solved for < $30k a year. If the intern can't find the stuff it's not going to be doing much harm.

"Google knew that YouTube’s popularity depended on infringing materials", yeah, because all interesting content is created by large corporations with a need to control, amen.

"Google and YouTube had the technology to stop infringement at any time but deliberately chose not to use it." and how much of Google's horsepower does Viacom think Google is obliged to use for identifying their content?

"The statements by Google regarding Viacom activities are merely red herrings and have no relevance on the legal facts of this case." LOL.

Notice how they didn't deny that they uploaded things just to have them flagged?

Also their release/post is nowhere near as smooth as Google's. You'd think as an entertainment firm they could make something that was a bit better of a read.

I wonder... If there were really "countless internal YouTube communications" endorsing infringement, wouldn't this case be over already? As in Summary Judgement over? Doesn't the very fact that this case is still being litigated indicate the hyperbole of this press release? I don't understand why Viacom is saying anything at all. Maybe they are trying to reassure their investors. In any event, I doubt we'll ever know what is really being uncovered in discovery.

Ars Technica has a few:

"Chen twice wrote that 80 percent of user traffic depended on pirated videos. He opposed removing infringing videos on the ground that 'if you remove the potential copyright infringements... site traffic and virality will drop to maybe 20 percent of what it is.' Karim proposed they 'just remove the obviously copyright infringing stuff.' But Chen again insisted that even if they removed only such obviously infringing clips, site traffic would drop at least 80 percent. ('if [we] remove all that content[,] we go from 100,000 views a day down to about 20,000 views or maybe even lower')."

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/03/smoking-guns...

I mean this is in 2003 though. 100,000 page views a day is practically nothing. If he said that in 2006+ it would've been a bit different.

Are you sure that was just put up today in response to the latest youtube counsel blog post? It does sound that way, but the statement isn't dated so I can't tell for sure if that is the "red herring" they are talking about or if this is an older statement.

I guess they deserve a +1 for getting the word "rampant" into a press release.

-100 for the rest though - very little of interest; just the usual mud sling return (a lot shakier than the mud thrown at them, though).

"These facts are undisputed. The statements by Google regarding Viacom activities are merely red herrings and have no relevance on the legal facts of this case."

Non-sequitur...

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