Class 3/14

Recently our class discussed how Viacom, the parent company of MTV and Comedy Central, sued Google and YouTube in federal court , in which Viacom complained of “massive intentional copyright infringement.” In its complaint, Viacom accused YouTube of a “brazen disregard” for the law. “YouTube has harnessed technology to willfully infringe copyrights on a huge scale, depriving writers, composers and performers of the rewards they are owed.” Google responded by saying it was not intimidated by the lawsuit and “confident that YouTube has respected the legal rights of copyright holders.” This lawsuit is certainly a battle of the titans and will have a significant impact on future use of the Internet. In my opinion YouTube has the much better case. Although Viacom in a way is right in that it feels its been robbed because it is not being compensated for its copyrighted content, and that content is being used without its permission. However, is Viacom really being hurt financially. The short "stolen" clips shown on YouTube it seems to me is a free form of advertisement for Viacom and will increase vieweship just like movie trailers or short advertisements for a show increase the publics interest in seeing the entire show. When people view the short clip on YouTube they will probably be more eager to see the entire show. These short clips on YouTube can be viewed as a marketing tool. I therefore think at the end the parties will compromise and reach an out of court settlement in that Viacom will allow short clips of copyrighted material to be shown on YouTube and YouTube may have to pay a modest amount of compensation. The challenge will be how will the parties work out a system so that Viacom gives permission to YouTube before it shows the clip.