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Viacom v. YouTube: Preliminary Observations |
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Written by Russ VerSteeg
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Tuesday, 08 January 2008 |
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Page 3 of 11
III. Media Hype
The media's reactions to this lawsuit have been mixed. Some have been quick to scold YouTube as if it were a naughty child with a bemusing ability to get away with adolescent pranks.
Others have defended the upstart, accusing Viacom of being a bunch of old-fashioned fuddy-duddies who just don't get it.
Even so, it is instructive to take a gander at a sampling of media commentary, if for no other reason than that it offers a microscopic opinion poll of public perception and public sentiment:
The notion of the Internet as a free ride, a place in cyberspace where almost anything is available for nothing, might at last be put to the real test.
YouTube had been a quirky, fast-growing start up until the deep-pocketed Internet search behemoth Google Inc. bought the company last November for $1.76 billion. But YouTube's soaring popularity, especially among younger people who are increasingly tuning out traditional media, has broadcasters frightened of losing viewers and advertising dollars.
You knew this had to happen. As everyone in the media world tries to get a handle on the future of mass communication, there comes a time when the mainstream producers of content have to take a stand against the hipster sites that appropriate said content without paying for it.
Like Napster
and Grokster before it, YouTube is the creation of the young and ambitious who built their business on giving people something for nothing. Napster and Grokster made money by selling access to copyrighted songs without paying royalties. In theory, they were only selling connections to whatever their users were interested in swapping, but what made people sign up for these services was the prospect of getting popular music for free. The courts decided that a business model built on encouraging piracy of copyrighted work violates the law.
At stake could be, if the action is litigated to the hilt, nothing less than the future of the copyright on the web. Translated into end-userease that means: Will the writing and music that I want to see be hidden behind walls that require money to be removed, or will it be floating around, as a lot of it is now, free for my perusal?
The suit is just the latest twist in a love-hate relationship between the entertainment and technology industries that has played out like a dysfunctional family's bad home video.
When we are dealing with intellectual property, how do we know who is a trespasser and who is a greedy land owner trying to enclose the public right of way. First lesson, analogies to physical property like the one I just used are dangerous. Most of these disputes are about whether a new market, enabled by technology, should lie inside or outside the scope of the artificial monopoly conferred by the intellectual property right.
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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 09 January 2008 )
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