Wednesday, March 14, 2007
First big one for Google
After its acquisition, Google was expecting to receive some sort of criticism for the content provided on YouTube’s webpage. The site is notorious for offering all kinds of videos ranging from copyrighted TV shows to full movies for free to visitors. The company was negligent of copyright and allows anything under the sun to be uploaded to its servers without checking the ownership.
Viacom, owner of VH1, MTV and Comedy Central has filed a $1 Billion dollar lawsuit against YouTube for publishing copyrighted materials and distributing them freely to their millions of daily visitors. This marks the biggest “fight” between the two media outlets regarding content. Prior to the lawsuit, Viacom requested that 100,000 videos be removed due to copyright infringements and since that request was sent last month, Viacom has reportedly found 50,000 more videos it wishes to be removed.
The lawsuit says that YouTube is ignorant of copyright and allows too many videos to be added without first checking the ownership. The duty to check copyright should be in the hands of Youtube, Viacom argues, but since YouTube has done a poor job to weed through the videos, the responsibility has been placed into the media publisher’s hands. YouTube argues it is protected under the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act the act takes responsibility from online publishers as long as content is deleted as asked by the copyright holders. YouTube has so far been slow in deleting the 150,000 videos requested from Viacom.
Google purchased YouTube for $1.76 Billion back in November. I just wonder now if Google might have just purchased another liability. When the transaction was made, $220 Million was set aside to cover future lawsuits regarding the content published on YouTube. It seems evident that YouTube might become another Lawsuit Magnet.
Viacom is now the first, and certainly not the last company that will attack YouTube’s policy. Pending the result of this lawsuit, we may see every cable company or content producer coming on to attack YouTube. These companies have a right, and a duty to protect their content, and really, their futures.
YouTube, prior to the Google acquisition was virtually worthless. The company had very little cash, and that it had was from its venture capital funding. The websites visitor stats certainly are impressive, although the traffic generated is certainly less than quality. YouTube suffers from high bandwith costs due to servicing large files to visitors. Each few can realistically cost YouTube pennies and yeild tenths of pennies in income. The viewers want to watch their movies, they don’t want to view advertisements.
I think the result of this lawsuit will be that YouTube has within X timeframe to remove the material in question or face a heavy penalty. In my opinion, both companies will win. Viacom will protect its media and YouTube will avoid heavy copyright infringement penalties. As far as I am concerned, Google’s purchase of YouTube was just them throwing money away. Google has a lot of cash on hand, but I think there are better investments than company’s that lose money.
Yahoo for the win!