Viacom slaps Google with $1 billion lawsuit
cnn.com
cnn.com
When you think about it, everything Google does, the Cache, Google Groups, The Image search, and even their golden baby, Search, requires that they deal with the copyrighted material of other people.. It's their bread and butter. They can do it under the law, or at least their lawyers are convinced they can, because of a legal concept known as Common Carrier (Some people in the audience will notice I'm simplifying. I'm trying to encourage discussion, not write a legal essay ;)
The Common Carrier clause, written under the (otherwise) dreaded DMCA, says that carriers, such as Earthlink/aol/etc are just carrying information, and they aren't responsible for it.. It provides rules, which say you need to take things down when you're asked, but you're otherwise not culpable- As long as you take it down when asked, you're OK.
Now, with Youtube, before Google invested anything in it, Google sees a lawsuit coming which could change that.. They KNOW that youtube is likely to be sued, and don't want to have the judge define the laws in a way which screws them over.. They know this lawsuit is coming one way or another, and that Youtube is poor, so their legal defense is likely to..well..suck.
Google realizes that if they buy Youtube, they can use their considerable legal muscle and financial capital to DEFEND youtube, and to make sure that they law isn't redefined in a way that screws them..
Since the US system works by a process of Common Law, the precedent is binding. That means that this case will be VERY influential in dertermining any other cases. And it's THOSE that is worried about.
THAT's why Google bought Youtube. They want this Lawsuit very badly.
Well, As an aside- There's also the line of reasoning that Sequoia Capital was heavily pushing Google for the acqusition.. YouTube was smart/lucky enough to convince Sequoia to invest, which gives Google a good inventive to do the buyout.. That said, I think this was an ancillary factor, not a primary one. Winning this lawsuit is worth a billion to Google by itself.
Ways to prove me wrong? If Google settles, I'm full of shit.
I mean, we could argue for a while about whether some kid should be allowed to download songs off of bittorrent. That's just some kid. But then, you have a huge corporation doing almost the same (okay, okay, with all due equivocations, like: They're only hosting/distributing, not uploading). Well, google isn't distributing video out of a love of the artform. I mean, person X builds/owns something, and person Y profits from it, or at least tries to. See no problem there? It might come down to "might makes right" here, if google has sufficiently expensive lawyers.
The seemingly obvious solution is to tack a 15-second advertisement on the videos and then share the proceeds with the owner.
What good is it to make money as a content aggregator if no one can afford to create content in the first place? There's a market here, I'm just not sure what it is.
Take a look up a few posts for my perspective ;)
The issue is on the supply side: How can content producers adapt to this altered economy? Right now, their answer has been to sue and hold tightly to the old business models. My argument is more nuanced than just protecting copyright -- I believe there is a way to make money producing quality content, but maybe not for the big, hollywood sized producers. I'm more interested in how to empower the people in-between viacom and the lone camcorder.