Internet 1, Viacom 0 - so far

[Juana]

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/06/23/viacom-v-internet-ro.html

Google's won the first round of the enormous lawsuit Viacom brought against it. Viacom is suing Google for $1 billion for not having copyright lawyers inspect all the videos that get uploaded to YouTube before they're made live (they're also asking that Google eliminate private videos because these movies -- often of personal moments in YouTubers' lives -- can't be inspected by Viacom's copyright enforcers).

The lawsuit has been a circus. Filings in the case reveal that Viacom paid dozens of marketing companies to clandestinely upload its videos to YouTube (sometimes "roughing them up" to make them look like pirate-chic leaks). Viacom uploaded so much of its content to YouTube that it actually lost track of which videos were "really" pirated, and which ones it had put there, and sent legal threats to Google over videos it had placed itself.

Other filings reveal profanity-laced email exchanges between different Viacom execs debating who will get to run YouTube when Viacom destroys it with lawsuits, and execs who express their desire to sue YouTube because they can't afford to buy the company and can't replicate its success on their own.

On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Louis Stanton ruled that YouTube was protected from liability for copyright infringement by the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The DMCA has a "safe harbor" provision that exempts service providers from copyright liability if they expeditiously remove material on notice that it is infringing. Viacom's unique interpretation of this statute held that online service providers should review all material before it went live. If they're right, you can kiss every message-board, Twitter-feed, photo-hosting service, and blogging platform goodbye -- even if it was worth someone's time to pay a lawyer $500/hour to look at Twitter and approve tweets before they went live, there just aren't enough lawyers in the universe to scratch the surface of these surfaces. For example, YouTube alone gets over 29 hours' worth of video per minute.

Viacom has vowed to appeal.

In dismissing the lawsuit before a trial, Stanton noted that Viacom had spent several months accumulating about 100,000 videos violating its copyright and then sent a mass takedown notice on Feb. 2, 2007. By the next business day, Stanton said, YouTube had removed virtually all of them.

Stanton said there's no dispute that "when YouTube was given the (takedown) notices, it removed the material."

Calling Stanton's reasoning "fundamentally flawed," Viacom said it was looking forward to challenging the decision in appeals court.

I am astounded they thought this could even work if they won. Too much runs on the internet, too much depends on it, and Viacom thinks it can shut down what the world made? The arrogance is astounding, if perhaps unsurprising.

[Freeky]

AAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!! Retards, the lot of them

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Ohmyfuckinggod 

I'm going to sue civilization and have it taken down for infringing on... something. I don't care what.

Hey Viacom, why don't you sue the sun?

[Freeky]

Ohmyfuckinggod 

I'm going to sue civilization and have it taken down for infringing on... something. I don't care what.

Hey Viacom, why don't you sue the sun?

Didn't someone try to sue God?

Suing civilization sounds totally more feasible.

[Zyzyx]

I look forward to the victory of the internet over the big media corporations. Because then it will prove that the jelly-like substance that composes the interbutts can only be squished by the Hammer of Sue Fucking Everything, but never stopped. That will take the Flamethrower of Fascist Agenda Advancement.

[Jasper]

What this says to me is that if you own copyrighted media, you've got to police your own content.  The mass takedown worked for viacom, the big lawsuit didn't.

Copyright infringement bounty hunting could actually become a viable job market, if they let it.  It could create a metric assload of new jobs.

[Captain Utopia]

Copyright infringement bounty hunting could actually become a viable job market, if they let it.  It could create a metric assload of new jobs.

Not unless you artificially restrict the job market.  But in a free-market, where anyone can report an infringement, then you could easy find millions of kids happy to earn pocket change instead.  Also, you'd get boosters uploading infringing content just to get a cut.  And you could work out some crazy ass technical solution to circumvent all that, but it's a losing battle.. after all, it's not as if removing your IP from the public consciousness translates into recouping your imagined "lost sales".

[Jasper]

Well, they could just hire them from within the company and have them on a fixed salary with a quota, so that they don't get more money for more takedowns, but they do get fired if they don't get enough.

That way, it's just as much work to fake it and they're already proven loyal.

[Requia ☣]

Assuming the quota is reasonable.

[Jasper]

They'd have to work one out with field testing.

[Triple Zero]

Copyright infringement bounty hunting could actually become a viable job market, if they let it.  It could create a metric assload of new jobs.

There are already companies that provide this service.

They also do the legal bits. It's where most of the cease & desist takedown notices come from.

You don't score publicity points by hiring those, so I guess that's why it's not really a big industry (yet).

[Requia ☣]

If any of them actually had a brain and didn't send takedown notices to people's videos of their kids just cause music was playing the background they might do a fair bit better.