Viacom Sues Google, Youtube – Commentary

Viacom, what are you thinking? YouTube has been around for a while now and has always had an issue with copyrighted content being posted on it, no matter how hard they tried to police it. Not only that, get over yourself, you’re not the only content owner who’s been infringed upon. If you were that concerned about your content being posted by fans from the beginning you would have tried to sue YouTube for copyright infringement then, not now. Suing YouTube at this point makes it look as though you’re more interested in the deep pockets of Google rather than the potential copyright infringement going on.

Other media firms, such as CBS, have seen the value of fans posting snippets of their content on YouTube. It’s a plain and simple viral campaign. You your biggest fans help promote your content. You don’t have to do anything except sit back and watch as others promote your material for you. Instead you think that you’re entitled to not only own the content, but to the revenue generated by the advertisements displayed along with your content. You didn’t place the ads there, so why should you get the revenue generated from them? The fans who posted the content aren’t seeing any of the revenue from the ads either, so it’s not like they have something to gain. And lets face it, you’re a media giant, you know that creating, broadcasting, promoting, and storing your content isn’t free, in fact it’s not even cheap. YouTube isn’t charging users to host and share their content, no matter who owns the initial copyright of the content, so they’re certainly not making any money that way. How else do you expect them to make enough money to pay for their hosting? Panhandling maybe? (I can see the sign now, “Will host copyrighted material for food”)

Also, stop and think about what you’re doing for a moment. You’re going after those responsible for hosting the content, not those who are responsible for uploading the content. This falls back to copyright issues from twenty years ago when cassette tapes and VHS tapes first came out! If there is a concern over copyright infringement, who is responsible for the infringement? Those who came up with the technology to allow it to possibly occur such as the manufacturers of blank tapes and devices with a record button? Or is the person who in the end, caused the recording device to copy or record copyrighted material? Obviously it wasn’t the manufacturers who made the recording and storage possible because those items thrived in their times and have given way to CD and DVD recording technology. Using that same path from analog to digital storage and going into online digital storage, YouTube, as well as Google, are not the ones responsible for this perceived copyright infringement.

Give it up. Don’t go wasting your money as well as Google and YouTube’s money on legal fees for a frivolous lawsuit. Instead, embrace the fact that you obviously have compelling enough content that your fans are willing to share it with the rest of the world.