p2pnet - rss feed: Viacom videos: $4.17 each
p2pnet.net news:- In the fight between ‘old-media’ giant, Viacom, and ‘new media giant’ YouTube, who’s going to win?
Or to pose the real question, which of the two will be the most successful in getting you to part with your hard earned cash by somehow persuading you to take advertisers’ blandishments seriously? Not that you actually enter the equation. It’s assumed you’ll be there. As always.
YouTube is a “scrounger” that’s, “built a lucrative business out of exploiting the devotion of fans to others’ creative works in order to enrich itself and its corporate parent Google” says Britain’s The Economist.
“With these words,” Viacom said it’s suing Google and YouTube for$1 billion for allegedly infringing on Viacom’s copyright, says the story.
After all, says Viacom, 160,000 clips have been shown 1.5 billions times on GooTube. And based on the number of videos and their viewings, and the amount Viacom is demanding, each clip must be worth some $4.17.
But, Viacom complains bitterly, it didn’t get one red penny.
Viacom is using a Safe-Harbour provision in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) under which it takes down offending videos when copyrights demand it.
This is “reminiscent of the music industry’s largely unsuccessful attempts to stamp out peer-to-peer song-sharing services,” said The New York Times on Wednesday, also noting “If a video is deleted, the person who posted it or copied it can make a few changes to the file and repost it.”
Viacom, “thus has to dedicate a full-time team just to policing YouTube, a cost that ought to be borne by YouTube, not rights owners,” says The Economist.
Google’s response? Quoting Google, Viacom utterly fails “to interact with users, to promote [its] content to a young and growing audience, and to tap into the online advertising market,” says the story: “Because Viacom is a dinosaur, in short.”
It adds:
But YouTube also looks bad. Ostensibly, it owes its stunning rise over the past year to the popularity of ‘user-generated content’ - home videos that amateurs upload for fun, thus creating a new social phenomenon. There are indeed plenty of those on YouTube. But advertisers seem unable to make any use of clips featuring, say, dogs on skateboards or teenagers trading expletives. So what paltry revenues YouTube does have - about $15m last year, according to Robert Peck at Bear Stearns, a bank - come from old-fashioned, professionally produced content. This is why Google and YouTube have recently struck deals with such media companies as CBS and the BBC. Others, such as NBC and Viacom, have been holding out.
For YouTube’s parent, Google, the suit, even if expected, is a particular headache. It means that Google now faces legal challenges on three major fronts. It is already facing lawsuits against its project to digitise books so that relevant passages can be included in its search results, even without the explicit consent of publishers; and against its display of copyrighted news articles on Google News, where Google suffered an initial defeat in a Belgian court last month. Now the fight extends to video.
In some cases it may behoove Google to take these suits to trial in order to clarify a principle. For instance, Google can reasonably argue that its book-scanning project, as a better card catalogue, only helps publishers and authors. But in the case of video clips, the suit ultimately appears to be a tactic by Viacom to get better terms in a deal that both sides need.
Cynics, “believe this is nought but posturing while the two companies figure out how to best to profitably cash in on users’ enthusiasms to their mutual and individual interests,” p2pnet suggested yesterday.
Or as The Economist sums it up far more adequately, “This war, to paraphrase Carl von Clausewitz, is only the continuation of negotiations by other means.”
Also See:
The Economist - Old media sue, March 14, 2007
The New York Times - WhoseTube? Viacom Sues Google Over Video Clips, March 14, 2007
p2pnet - Viacom, YouTube and the DMCA, March 15, 2007
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March 16th, 2007 at 1:23 pm
Were I Google and lost this, I would make sure and take care of Viacom. There would be nowhere on Google where Viacom’s products could be found in search. This would grant them the “rights” they are so suing for. Somehow when their competitors offerings are found but not their own, I believe they would have a serious change of heart about what is important.
It is well known (especially for the music cartels) that they are reluctant to make known just what is owned by whom. Since the copyright holder is the only one that knows for sure what belongs to them. It is also made plain in law that any holder that doesn’t enforce their claims, can lose those rights.
Google has made the offer to take down infringing material, provided the holder makes claim of infringement of a particular item. This is the holders responsibility in that protecting of the copyright (not Google) to make the claim since there is no accurate database on what is whose. Making the statement someone should know doesn’t make the knowledge available.
As has been demonstrated in the past, filters don’t work. Renaming an item, gets it around the filter. Other methods have pretty much proven to be snake oil and aren’t effective either. Without 100% guarantee that these filters will only get the holders material but not whatever else is out there, similarly named but not an infringement is a hold up the cartels have not satisfactorily addressed. Until it is, there is no way anyone can tell what is what in search or in filter database.
This is nothing less than posturing by the cartels in hopes of fishing a better deal. Since Google isn’t willing to give the walls of the store and leave the windows, the cartels are trying to put Google over the barrel in an attempt to heist the price. Again attempting extortion to get their way. Again trying to say it is the victim that should fix their problem.
More and more I like what I see coming out of the cartels less and less in business practices. I do hope they lose this case. But should it come to be that they win, I would make sure in Googles options that it would cost them more in the long run than they got out of it.
March 16th, 2007 at 2:02 pm
“which of the two will be the most successful in getting you to part with your hard earned cash…”
At $4.17 A piece I wouldn’t buy from either (most people won’t). First of all if I want to watch T.V. I turn on the T.V. When there’s nothing on T.V. I go on the Internet. Then there’s the quality issue. Youtube videos are such awful quality they’re worth NOTHING. Naturally Viacom will want DRM. After my miserable experience with DRM on a legal WMA I downloaded I’ll NEVER tolerate that crap again, even if it’s free it’s not worth the limitations. It’s too much hassle.
If you pay for cable or satellite you’ve paid Viacom and should be allowed to watch low quality videos from Youtube for “free”.
March 16th, 2007 at 2:45 pm
er, I doin’t think Jon seriously means the videos cost 4.17 each.
March 16th, 2007 at 6:57 pm
I didn’t. Obviously, it couldn’t be correct since whoever calculated the amount clearly thought of a number, quadrupled it, subtracted the date of his wife’s birthday, multiplied it buy 1,000 and then rounded it out to $1 billion. heh
Cheers!
March 16th, 2007 at 7:18 pm
“It is also made plain in law that any holder that doesn’t enforce their claims, can lose those rights.”
No. That’s trademark law. That provision in trademark law allows for trademarks to be retained indefinitely. Copyrights and patents, on the other hand, have a set limit on their length of enforceability, and can be enforced or ignored at the holder’s discretion without fear of the loss of these rights.