You remember when Viacom demanded YouTube to pull more than 100.000 videos, right? As far as I remember, YouTube tried to comply with this demand and removed many clips from the site.
However, this must have not been enough for Viacom since today they announced that they sued YouTube for a total of 1 billion dollars for a “massive intentional copyright infringement”. I think “massive” and “intentional” are the interesting words in this quote.
We will all see how this turns out but my opinion is that YouTube will be able to get out of this. As Fred Wilson says this is very different from the Napster case and it will be interesting how Viacom will accuse YouTube (apart from the obvious way) and how Google/YouTube (GooTube) will defend themselves.
In situations like these, Google usually leaves the announcements to YouTube but this time it is widely reported that they came out with a statement:
We have not received the lawsuit but are confident that YouTube has respected the legal rights of copyright holders and believe the courts will agree. YouTube is great for users and offers real opportunities to rights holders: the opportunity to interact with users; to promote their content to a young and growing audience; and to tap into the online advertising market. We will certainly not let this suit become a distraction to the continuing growth and strong performance of YouTube and its ability to attract more users, more traffic and build a stronger community.
Let’s see how this will turn out. What do you think the outcome will be? Do you see Viacom as the victim of a “massive and intentional copyright infringement”?
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[tags] youtube, viacom, copyright, law, legislation[/tags]
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