Some stories break and by the time you get around to starting production on the magazine it’s old news. A great shame but such is the nature of a monthly publication. Not so with blogs but when you are knee-deep in said process the brain can’t tolerate any more than one committment at a time.
So here’s my take on the Google/Viacom situation:
The short version is that after a 18 months of wrangling/threats a federal court judge has demanded Google hand over logs of every user, every search, every video watched and how many times users took the time to watch it. Basically the entire history of YouTube is being laid bare and you, a humble user, will have your personal history laid bare for a great big faceless corporate entity to flick through at will.
Actually no that isn’t really the case.
Viacom’s argument is they want to assess that out of all the content on YouTube how much of it is legally theirs and how much of it is footage of babies, skaters falling on their asses and Ms Carolina fluffing her lines. If Viacom can can prove the extent of Google’s liability it can also assess how much of that $1billion they are suing for is likely to come their way. Because Google are like, so not caring about the whole copyright thing.
Also not the case.
youTube has been in trouble over copyright violation almost since day one with the appearance of the Lazy Sunday clip from Saturday Night Live. Deciding that coming up with an amicable solution was better than being sued into oblivion (bear in mind this was a small startup at the time) was to 1) let any material flagged by users as being in violation of copyright can be taken down immediately 2) clips would be limited to only 10 minutes (unless it’s original material, in which case you can work away) and 3) if a studio wishes they can run streaming ads across their own material if they wish to post it.
That’s as good as it gets. Ask and it will be removed. It’s not like YouTube is able to control what’s up on the ste, that’s the beauty of user generated content.
Viacom’s counterpoint is the stuff of hight comedy and I almost like them for displaying a kind of laziness found only in American corporate culture (this is a country where companies try to sue themselves after all).
1) Infringement of copyright harms their ad revenue and future production 2) online video is as valuable as TV broadcast 3) YouTube/Google is liable for everything put up on their site, they should be screening each of the 65.000 vdeos uploaded daily for violations.
Of course Viacom could be doing the last one themselves but apparently that’s too hard. So they reject the simple solution to a simple problem and go straight for the cash. They just need to prove they are losing out. Because, like, P2P sharing ofr HD material isn’t affecting them at all in comparison to cut up clips of reruns streaming in poor quality.
The part that really makes me chuckle is their attitude to online video as a revenue source. During the writers’ strike Viacom said writers were not entitled to video from online sources as it was for promotional purposes only and had NO MONETARY VALUE - even though ads were being streamed across content on network websites.
Viacom, and the federal justice system for that matter, aren’t interested in who specific users are, they just want to pin a monetary value on their troubles by matching column A of what they want with column b of what they think they can actually get. Sure they have my username and an IP address but the latter change frequently and does anyone really want to trawl my user history for Cosby Show outtakes? Thought not.
So I’m not terribly worried about Viacom, a US business, having access to my viewing history as an Irish person living far away from their domestic market. Figuring out who I am out of a worldwide audience of millions would just be too damn hard. God bless America.
