Collateral Damage Takedown Victims Start Suing Viacom
from the our-lovely-legal-system-at-work dept
While Viacom is busy basking in the glow of its pointless lawsuit against YouTube, its lawyers may be busy on a separate, but related front. Back when the company demanded Google take down certain clips, among the takedown notices were a fair number of videos that the company had no rights over -- which of course were still taken down. It's important to note, however, that when you file a DMCA takedown notice, part of that claim is that you insist you own the rights to that content. It appears that at least some of those who were the victims of this collateral damage are now turning around and suing Viacom for taking their content offline with bogus DMCA claims. Viacom is trying to brush off these claims by suggesting it's no big deal that a few legitimate videos were taken down, since it was in the process of taking down so many actual infringing videos. Of course, that's small comfort to the people who actually wanted their videos on YouTube. It's amusing (but not surprising) that Viacom can claim that its copyrights are so important while ignoring the rights of others.
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Re:
anyway, what are they suing for, money or an apology?
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Karma
I think they should sue for triple damages. Willful infringement - Viacom openly admits not caring.
I'm thinking...class action lawsuit. Come on, there's gotta be some evil lawyer somewhere that could actually do the world some good for once...
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Viacom Sucks
They then proceed to turn around and act like they did no harm when they did the same done to them. Their have as many sides as dice if not more.
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Re: Viacom Sucks
As far as Viacom being held liable, im sure some lawyer will insist that it was Googles fault, not Viacom, that the wrong media was removed. It's not like they themselves were given the right to access the database and delete whatever they saw fit. Anyway I'm hopefull a judge will drop both cases.
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Re: Re: Viacom Sucks
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Re: Re: Viacom Sucks
Welcome to the web Jacka**.
If you don't like they're grammer go back to print.
Your on-topic remark is useless too!
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Re: Re: Viacom Sucks
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Re: Re: Viacom Sucks
Tell me this is a joke. A troll. There is no way this guy wrote a criticism of someone else's supposedly poor use of the language while making even more mistakes himself??!!
Reading what is written on the Internet is an exercise in mental gymnastics. I go back and forth between laughing, screaming and just sighing in sad resignation.
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Re: Re: Viacom Sucks
Since you were so hard on Mr. Hinkle for his various usages of their and they're I'm not sure that I can forgive your lack of understanding of the use of the apostrophe when writing the possessive and contractions, nor your ability to comprehend the simple rule that 'I' should always be capitalized.
Irony is the best comedy.
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IP Rights
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Re: IP Rights
Flawed analogy. You're conflating intellectual property with real, tangible property. Please don't do that.
A better analogy would be if you took a magic wand and made *exact duplicates* of most of my possessions and put them in a park for everyone to use for free. I would still retain possessions of most of my possessions, and couldn't care less if everyone freely used those exact duplicates in a park somewhere.
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Re: IP Rights
Also, Viacom is at fault because they wrongly claimed they owned something and based on that claim, YouTube followed the law (which they're good at) and removed it.
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What "rights"?
Secondly, rights to what? If Google were robbing them of their rights to profit from their stuff, or costing them something, then naturally they should be held to account.
However, if this is just Viacom pounding their chests and yodeling "It's our Stuuuuuuff", then they should be thrown out on their ear and slapped with a "Don't do that again" injunction. It appears to me that Google is doing a great job giving Viacom free publicity.
This is all secondary to the fact that Copyright laws need a major rewrite - this time with the public at the table.
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Re: What "rights"?
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Right to profit
US Constitution, Section 8
That "exclusive right" includes the right to profit from their stuff.
Keep taking the pills...
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Re: IP Rights
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We have a contender...
I'm no perfectionist, but that massive run-on-sentence is seriously hard to read.
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And as has previously been reported (tho' that may be wrong, of course), Viacom had to list the clips it wanted removing... all YouTube did was honour that list.
So the faulty removal of non-Viacom owned content is entirely Viacom's fault.
Think on...
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Thoughts
rofl, nice
To the article:
I am just glad that the people aren't stupid enough to sue Google because it is not their fault. They were following a law, however stupid and flawed it is. I am amazed to see the people being hurt actually suing the right people for a change. It is usually some user hurt by somebody's stupid video they took of the stupider person doing something incredibly stupid. And then the fool goes and sues Google because its apparently Google's fault that they did something embarrassing and somebody else put it online.
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How about this analogy?
Imagine if I run a radio station. On said station I play established and unknown rock bands. A few dozen known rock bands (I mean huge like Metallica, Rolling Stones, and Korn) gives a list of the songs that they claim to own the rights to and tells me to remove them. On that list are a few songs that do not belong to any of those bands but belong to your underground band. How is it right for them to claim ownership of your material? How would you feel if when you called them on it they basically just say, "Oh well, so what?"
Viacom was so adamant in defending the rights of there own content but they somehow managed to not verify that the list of content they wanted removed was really theirs? I'm willing to bet that if they had missed some of their content they would write up another removal order quick, fast and in a damn hurry. Owning a lot of content does not excuse you from veryfing what you own and it most certainly does not give you permission to write up mass removal orders under the justification that the content "might be yours."
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The problem is that big corporations can get away with things that you couldn't. For example, let's say you owe one of the utility companies that provides service to your home some money - after a couple of months of no payment they will send someone around to shut off your service, which is fine, except for one thing. Ever had THEM owe YOU money, for example from cutting down a tree on your property that they had no legal right to cut, or tearing up your lawn while laying new pipes or cables? IF they bother to compensate you at all, it will likely take a lot longer than two months, and a lot of your time and effort to get them to pay off. In a fair and just world, after two months of non-payment, you could go out and dig up their cables or pipes and at least sell the metal for scrap to recover your loss - but if YOU try that, you'd wind up in jail. See, YOU have to go to court and get a judgment to exercise your remedies, but big corporations somehow get to skip that whole court thing and get to just take action against you... and very often they have specific legislation that protects them in that, as though your lawmakers just assume that big corporations can do no wrong.
Someday, maybe voters will actually stop voting for politicians that bend over for any big corporation that throws a campaign contribution their way. Unfortunately the voters have not yet become sufficiently disgusted with this sort of behavior by politicians. Maybe it will take a generation or two of oppression by the big corporations before people finally figure out that the corporation is a soulless, often evil entity with no sense of conscience (with rare exceptions, where the people in charge actually feel responsible to do the right thing). In the vast majority of cases the corporation exists only to maximize profits for their shareholders or owners, and the the morality of their actions is a very low priority on their list of considerations prior to taking any action.
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Just the Facts
In the short run, in small doses, infringement makes everyone happy. In the long run, in large ones, songs stop getting recorded, television shows stop getting made. Viacom can protect itself, but the principle Viacom is defending protects artists and creators big AND small. YouTube sells ads and makes money on the site. Copyright owners without a Youtube deal don't. It seems simple to me that it's entirely unfair to allow YouTube to profit and not protect against the damage.
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If manual review takes around 10 seconds each, do the math and think about how many man-years of effort this would be.
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Re: Viacom
I imagine that some technology could filter the content, boosting accuracy and productivity ten-fold.
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This is bad news for Google. Not so much Viacom
The only way Google is going to be able to avoid future lawsuits from other content companies like Viacom is by hammering out some sort of agreement with them to allow their content to be shown via Youtube/Gvideo. The problem is any agreement that is satisfactory to the content companies is going to involve some level of oversight by the content companies over what and how much of their content is posted for free. In addition Google will probably always be responsible for taking down unauthorized content in a reasonable amount of time.
Now if content companies come under scrutiny themselves for wrongly removing content--if user lawsuits continue--then why would these content companies want to continue to take responsibility for removing their illegally posted content? They might just as well tell Google to do it itself, as it is Google's responsibility according to current law to make sure pirated content is taken down. But does Google want that headache? How is Google going to identify what is copyrighted material?
Its in Google's interest that content companies feel comfortable policing their own content. This lawsuit doesn't make them comfortable. In fact I suspect Google will come down on Viacom's side on this one.
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Worse for Viacom, in my book.
Secondly there is the backlash from the collateral takedowns.
Thirdly, I will be less inclined to consume Viacom's products (Paramount, Dreamworks etc), and neither will anyone I know.
Viacom may have the legal high ground, but Google have less to lose. Besides... who loses when a couple of million geeks start telling their friends not to buy Shrek XVII?
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Viacom
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