Lawsuit over YouTube video: It's what everyone's watching
A look at what's at stake in Viacom Inc.'s $1 billion copyright infringement suit against Google.
from the March 23, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 3
"One [question] is whether the DMCA has teeth or can content owners sue hosting sites willy-nilly, thereby forcing such sites to block all content," says Mark Sigal, cofounder and CEO of vSocial Inc., an online video service provider. "Second is the larger question of whether consumers have the right to capture snippets of their favorite shows and virally distribute them. Is that a 'fair use'?"
No matter what happens – a finding for or against YouTube, or a settlement – the suit will help define the future of digital media for millions of users of online video sites, say experts.
The case "is the one everyone is watching because these are the two giants in the Internet kingdom, each representing a different philosophy on how to grow and succeed," says Leonard Fuld, president of Fuld & Co. in Cambridge, Mass., a research and consulting service for Fortune 500 companies. "Google wants to be the arbiter of all knowledge, and Viacom wants to control its own destiny, and those are sometimes competing objectives."
In its court filings, Viacom states that YouTube willfully infringes on copyrighted material from its shows on MTV Networks, VH1, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, and other cable networks. It does so "on a massive scale," Viacom says, by streaming video snippets of shows ranging from "The Daily Show" to "SpongeBob SquarePants" to "MTV Unplugged" more than 1.5 billion times. The real number is much larger because, Viacom alleges, YouTube makes it difficult for copyrighted content to be easily detected.
The media giant seeks a permanent injunction to require YouTube to "employ reasonable methodologies to prevent or limit [copyright] infringement."
"We believe that we own our content and that, for any use of it, someone needs to seek our permission and we should be paid appropriately," says Carl Folta, Viacom spokesman. "This [suit] is something we feel we have to do to enforce our rights of ownership."
Google and YouTube say they comply with copyright law under the "safe harbor" provision of DMCA. That provision exempts hosting companies such as YouTube from liability for infringing copyright if the website takes copyrighted material down once it is notified the video has been posted.
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