Today Viacom, (showing some major cojones) brought a $1 billion lawsuit against Google and YouTube regarding the ongoing copyright infringement debate. Viacom actually calls into question YouTube’s business model:

YouTube is a significant, for-profit organization that has 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. Their business model, which is based on building traffic and
selling advertising off of unlicensed content, is clearly illegal and
is in obvious conflict with copyright laws. In fact, YouTube’s strategy
has been to avoid taking proactive steps to curtail the infringement on
its site, thus generating significant traffic and revenues for itself
while shifting the entire burden – and high cost – of monitoring
YouTube onto the victims of its infringement.

I think Viacom has a valid point and here is why:

1. Viacom is a strong brand name, they have every right to protect their images and copyrighted property from illegal distribution
2. Having no control over how your material is distributed can lead to your characters and images being used in situations that are detrimental to the brands they worked so hard to build
3. Google/YouTube has made little to no effort to respect the property of Viacom, basically all they have put up is a little text message saying “If this video is not your property, please don’t post it”
4. Having the users of YouTube police the content they are putting up is a poor answer to “Please take down our copyrighted material”
5. Google has been able to get away with doing stuff like this for far too long and its nice to someone fighting back

Now Viacom is no small company and I am certain that they have been in similar situations, perhaps not to this magnitude though. I think that even though I believe they are in the right, they have a huge chance of failure.

1. Google must have a built in loophole somewhere whether it is that the users police the content or something else, you don’t get to be such a big company by following the rules ALL the time
2. Viacom is going after the biggest online company ever, Google has “endless” resources and could last much longer in a monetary legal battle
3. Knowing the online space as well as Google and having as much money as they do will allow them to immediately outbid and outspend Viacom on any further ventures they want to take. (e.g. say Google complies and and takes down all Viacom property, Viacom then proceeds to try and buy funnysouthparkvideos.com or something like that, Google could just continuously outbuy them and sabotage them in every manor, obviously not a good business model but easily doable, you know just peacefully readjust their acquisition strategy)
4. I think Viacom will see a sharp drop in interest of their products unless they can quickly build a community around their properties on another site (sanctioned by them obviously)
5. YouTube users will see this as an attack on them and the website they hold near and dear to their hearts resulting in them seeing Viacom as the enemy and possibly causing weening interest in all of Viacom’s online media

I respect Viacom’s decision to go after YouTube and Google, I just think that the web and its progression of how online property is to be handled is not as far along as the real world, resulting in some interesting verdicts. But only time will tell us what is actually going to happen, should be interesting.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 13th, 2007 at 3:17 pm and is filed under Entertainment, Uncategorized, internet marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.