Viacom, parent company of CBS, MTV, and Comedy Central, is suing YouTube for $1 billion. The media conglomerate says YouTube, owned by Google, has acted improperly by allowing its users to post clips of Viacom content.
In October, YouTube said it began purging Comedy Central clips from its site. But in February, the company demanded that YouTube remove more than 100,000 clips of Viacom shows. Also in February, Viacom agreed to license much of its content to Joost, a nascent YouTube rival.If YouTube is forced to keep its sight completely free of copyrighted content, will it turn out to be worth the $1.65 billion dollars that Google paid for it? It is hard to imagine that birthday party home videos and the next Lonelygirl 15, whoever she may be, will be much of a draw. The only revenue model it might be able to pursue profitably would be pornography, and who wants to be in that business?
Viacom alleges that YouTube does little or nothing to prevent users from posting copyrighted videos from appearing on its site, largely because such popular videos -- which include clips from Comedy Central's "South Park" and "The Colbert Report" and Nickelodeon's "SpongeBob SquarePants" -- help drive viewers to the ads that appear on YouTube.
"Defendants know and intend that a substantial amount of the content on the YouTube site consists of unlicensed infringing copies of copyrighted works and have done little or nothing to prevent this massive infringement," reads Viacom's complaint, brought in a New York federal court. "To the contrary, the availability on the YouTube site of a vast library of the copyrighted works of plaintiffs and others is the cornerstone of defendants' business plan."
The Viacom suit alleges that YouTube's attempts to protect copyrighted material have fallen short.
0 comments:
Post a Comment