Do Viacom have a case against YouTube?
A judge in the U.S. has ordered Google to provide records of who watches which video clips on YouTube and when. The 12 terabytes of data (the equivalent of 12 million books) will be used to prove what proportion of material watched on YouTube is copyrighted material. This is part of an action being brought by Viacom, owners of Paramount Pictures and Nickelodeon among many others, and is aimed at protecting shows such as "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" and "SpongeBob SquarePants" which are hurting badly as a consequence of people watching four-minute clips days later on a screen the size of your hand through a blizzard of static.
But the biggest irony is that Viacom is also the owner of MTV and VH1, businesses whose programming was entirely built on running video clips which were made, paid for and owned by the record companies. Also standing in line to protect their meagre revenue stream is another deserving organisation, the Premier League.
What do you think? Do these people have a legitimate grievance or should they just be grateful for the fact that somebody somewhere wants to capture their material and show it to somebody else?
- More from David Hepworth.
- Login or register to post comments
In legal terms
they do have a point - their copyright has been infringed on a massive scale. However, 1) I'm not sure why they need to know that I've watched videos on YouTube to prove that this is the case and 2) how do they think this is going to end? I can't see a way that it ends well for Viacom, even if they win.
Whether they have a case or not
(In legal terms I don't think there is any real doubt that they do) the main point is that this is indicative of the Canute-like stance being taken by the 'old' technologies.
There seems to me to be little point in the Viacoms of this world attempting to preserve the status quo like this, even if it is understandable. The world has moved on and their efforts would be better employed trying to find a business model based on new technology rather than attempting to preserve the old.
They may succeed in restricting YouTube, but if they do an alternative YouTube will spring up in (say) Russia which will take them a while to identify and get closed. It has happened elsewhere - the music industry managed to get AllofMP3 shut down, but I am aware of at least two others that have stepped into the breach.
A case is one thing...
....but a grievance is another.
What I can't see is how YouTube clips of Jon Stewart's show or Premiership goals actually hurts anyone's business. It obviously vexes them greatly that somebody somewhere is piggy-backing on their business but isn't that the way of the world?
Every morning half of the content of BBC Radio's news programmes is made up of items read straight out of the papers. Do the publishers of The Sun or The Guardian complain or do they think, well, that's a few more people who know of my newspaper and might buy it as a consequence?
The wonderful thing about YouTube is that its technical limitation of only being able to carry short clips at low resolution means it's a perfect way of sampling things without being a very good way to watch them.
Indeed
The fact that TV is pointing one way by going after YouTube while at the same time rushing to get their own versions of iPlayer onto our screens, highlights a huge inconsistency in their approach. They generate little meaningful revenue from Web-based TV so why do it?
I would guess because they retain the comforting illusion of control and at least get something in Ad-based revenue off the back of it.
Last night, I watched the
Last night, I watched the Feb 2007 "Battle Beet" episode of Iron Chef America
broken down into 4 seperate ten minute chunks. I clicked the "watch in high quality" link and had a very satistactory viewing experience.
Irony
Twice, The Colbert Report featured one of my hobby websites. They didn't ask my permission, and although I don't know the ins and outs of the law, I assume they should have - certainly, each time the site appeared on any other TV show, American or otherwise, I had to sign a release form.
When I uploaded a clip of the show (just the bit featuring my site) to YouTube, Paramount Pictures (through Viacom) had it pulled for copyright violation. So it's OK for them to use my content without permission, but I can't use theirs.
Of course, I don't care that they didn't ask my permission. They're welcome to use whatever they want, and they needn't ask. It was free promotion - traffic to the site spiked each time it was featured, and the advertising clicks rose. Everyone's happy.
Which is a long-winded way of getting to my point: that Viacom, The Premier League etc. do not seem to appreciate the enormous, incalculable value to be gained from allowing their content to be freely available on YouTube and the rest.
RCA records have promoted Avril Lavigne's Girlfriend video on YouTube. It's been watched over 90,000,000 times. That's 90,000,000 people who have chosen specifically to watch the video. They didn't happen to catch it on MTV, or turn a magazine page to see an advert, or hear it on the radio as they drove to work. They chose to watch it. And it didn't cost RCA a cent. Best. Marketing. Ever.
And Viacom, as they scramble to be compensated because people are spending all day forwarding clips of The John Stewart Show to their friends, spreading the word, fail to see this. They're enormous idiots.
I guess the
question is - how does TV fund itself if it doesn't generate advertising revenue in the old way?
Licensed high quality, high added value, downloads seems to me to be one obvious route. I which case, as you say, they should be aiming to get as many clips as possible on YouTube to drive people to their site.
I don't think they're necessarily enormous idiots
I suspect all Viacom are after is a nice bite of the tasty Google pie with an out-of-court settlement. Even if they win the case, all Google has to do is set up a shell company somewhere outside the US - in Spain, for example, where not-for-profit file-sharing is legal and Viacom, as a copyright holder, receives its cut of the revenue from the canon on hardware - and house YouTube from there.
In the short term, it'll be for Google's lawyers to decide on a cost/benefit basis whether bunging Viacom a few quid to shut up is more financially feasible than restructuring the company abroad.
And Fraser has also entirely grasped the equivalent boost.....
...to revenue given by "illegal" downloading of sound.
To be honest...
I don't necessarily think the same applies with music. Low-res YouTube clips are different from full album FLAC files... but there are so many ifs and buts and grey areas it's near impossible to put a really coherent, definitive argument together.
I concur
Fraser said pretty much what I thought. Except I don't have a website for Viacom to filch from.
It's about control
and if you have paid for the rights you need to protect them. If people are prepared to pay for content in DVD's or goal clips on their mobile, then these markets will be protected. People who don't have the rights shouldn't post the content.
The biggest problems to me are the lack of common sense applied to situations (companies just take a binary view that all content is covered regardless of value) and that business will side with business and the customer gets treated badly (the virgin media/bpi letters on file sharing and DRM in general).
so nobodies bothered
about their personal viewing habits being handed over to all and sundry. I know the only way to keep any privacy on line is to never use it but privacy is privacy it's not divisible. I know it's fashionable to say these things don't matter but I din't sign up to this sort of thing. Also if the idea is to sue users the people who will get sued will be those who sign up to upload stuff and have ironically created the whole business in the first place. Most of the most popular clips on youtube are homegrown clips not corporate stuff.
But (and I'm beginning to sound like the Man)
if you want to look at stuff that you have not paid for and that shouldn't be freely available, there is an inherent irony that you should then be concerned about your privacy when you don't worry about the privacy of the content owner. Two sides of the same coin. If you don't view this stuff you have every right to your privacy. Most intellectual property that you are licenced to use (particularly computer software) has very specific controls in the licence which will effectively require you to prove you are not abusing the licence. I can see this approach being more common in entertainment media with you contract with sky etc. Its probably hidden somewhere already on dvd's etc.
there's difference between watching
a film a clip of a pop show made almost 50 years ago and having the details of your computer use randomly distributed. There is a good case that most computer licences can't be inforced because a. we don't read them. b. they are dislayed n a way to make us not read them. c .most people don't understand them in the first place.
I agree
the clip of a 50 year old pop show probably has little or no value and therefore should have a different approach to the current series of Heroes or similar.
Computer licences are enforceable because, by and large, they are reasonable. Ignorance is no defence and, normally, you have to accept the terms. Believe me, large software corporations spend an enourmous amount of time enforcing licence terms to other corporations that use them. They don't go after individuals because its not cost effective.
One thing this proves....
...is that, just as the only people who got rich out of the California Gold Rush were the people selling the shovels, the people who have prospered hugely out of cases like this are the lawyers. They're the ones egging on senior executives, many of whom are as clueless about the Internet as Peter Kaye's mum, to go to court.
When they should be
working their socks off devising new ways to market and revenue that all parties to the deal get satisfaction. That would be every other industry bar the music & film biz who seem to have King Canute in on their strategy discussions.