When Viacom announced that it was going to sue YouTube and Google, plenty of folks on the Web did that whole, “you’ll never beat YouTube, YouTube forever, etc” schtick. Turns out these silly geese may have a point.
BusinessWeek has a solid article analyzing why YouTube and Google may be on solid legal footing and have no real reason at all to fear Viacom. The primary reason is that YouTube’s business model doesn’t revolve around copyrighted material (like Napster’s did back in the day), but on really great, homemade, user-generated content. In other words, Viacom can’t turn around and say YouTube profits solely off its copyrighted material. When infringing material is reported to YouTube, it’s soon removed.
Another reason is that, unlike the P2P companies of years past that the RIAA sued into oblivion, YouTube has plenty of money behind it in the form of Google with which to fight off lawsuits.
Kudos to BusinessWeek for coming up with rational explanations and not just “Viacom sucks, YouTube rules!”
Viacom’s Suit Won’t Snuff Out YouTube [BusinessWeek]
There is a big difference between saying that the lawsuit isn’t a Napster-reloaded and claiming that it “has no chance of succeeding.”
I kind of agree with Terry on this one…the headline is a bit misleading, but this is interesting nonetheless!
Viacom hasn’t asked YouTube to be shut down, so it’s unlikely to “snuff out” YouTube. But that doesn’t mean it won’t win. Unlike Napster and Grokster, there is direct infringement, not just secondary infringement, because YouTube plays the videos. Second, Viacom argues that basic filtering should be implemented, not that the entire site is used overwhelmingly for infringement. The argument is that YouTube knows about infringement and isn’t getting rid of it. That is clearly right.
I think they may be able to argue against “knows about the infringement” since every time they know about it they take it down. Will it come down to “since humans are inherently evil, allowing anyone to upload anything is infringement”? Boy, I’d love that to be the final judgment.