Viacom trying to frame Youtube
Posted on | March 18, 2010 | No Comments
Earlier today, several sealed legal documents of Viacom’s copyright infringement lawsuit against Youtube where opened; Youtube chief legal counsel Zahavah Levine wrote a blog post which was a summary of the legal evidences provided by Youtube.
The blog mentions that every video that is uploaded to its site by amateur individuals or by big movie studios is copyrighted to its uploader/creator. That means your cute cat video that you have shot and uploaded to youtube is copyrighted to you as much as Harry Potter trailers uploaded by Warner Brothers is copyrighted to them.
It also mentions how Viacom is trying to sue Youtube by framing them. Here is the excerpt.
For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site. It deliberately “roughed up” the videos to make them look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube accounts using phony email addresses. It even sent employees to Kinko’s to upload clips from computers that couldn’t be traced to Viacom. And in an effort to promote its own shows, as a matter of company policy Viacom routinely left up clips from shows that had been uploaded to YouTube by ordinary users. Executives as high up as the president of Comedy Central and the head of MTV Networks felt “very strongly” that clips from shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report should remain on YouTube.
Viacom’s efforts to disguise its promotional use of YouTube worked so well that even its own employees could not keep track of everything it was posting or leaving up on the site. As a result, on countless occasions Viacom demanded the removal of clips that it had uploaded to YouTube, only to return later to sheepishly ask for their reinstatement. In fact, some of the very clips that Viacom is suing us over were actually uploaded by Viacom itself.
Techcrunch perfectly summarized this revelation
In other words, while Viacom’s lawyers were issuing takedown notices, its marketers were putting clips up on YouTube to promote Viacom movies and TV shows. You’ve got to wonder what the judge will make of that evidence.
UPDATE:
I read this interesting comment on reddit by a user. Its credibility, unfortunately, cannot be verified but it sounds genuine.
I worked on a show for MTV (which is owned by Viacom), and was asked by the network to leak footage of our show to Youtube, to get some kind of free viral publicity. The footage was already digital, but I had to run it through an analogue recorder to give it a time-code burn-in, thus appearing more like a leak. After one of the clips was posted to “Pink Is the New Blog”, we got a huge congratulations e-mail from the network executive in charge of our show.
UPDATE:
Excerpt from Viacom’s reply to Youtube
Google and YouTube had the technology to stop infringement at any time but deliberately chose not to use it. They would only offer to protect Viacom’s content if Viacom agreed to license those works, effectively holding copyright protection as ransom for a license.
These facts are undisputed. The statements by Google regarding Viacom activities are merely red herrings and have no relevance on the legal facts of this case.
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