If you’re looking for a delicious tale about corporate deceit, greed, and misandry and have sometime to spare then do check out this newly unsealed court document that Viacom and Google posted yesterday in the entertainment company’s $1 billion copyright infringement suit against Google\YouTube. Its obvious to everyone that YouTube is compounded with pirated material against which Google sells ads. Which includs stuff like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. Google says Viacom could have taken the clips down but wanted them there and surreptitiously posted many itself to create viral marketing campaigns for its entertainment. With this document being made public YouTube’s chief counsel Zahavah Levine had lots to say in his blog post
In his blog Levine defended YouTube’s against Viacom’s allegations, revealing that Viacom “secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there.” Levine also notes that “Viacom tried repeatedly to buy YouTube,” suggesting that the current $1 billion lawsuit is an attempt to cash in on YouTube. Viacom indicate that emails from YouTube co-founder Steve Chen including one where he said “if you remove the potential copyright infringements … site traffic and virality will drop to maybe 20% of what it is.”
Viacom revealed that Chen discussed yet again in another conversation how YouTube could handle a hot news clip from CNN: “[I] really don’t see what will happen. What? Someone from CNN sees it? He happens to be someone with power? He happens to want to take it down right away. He gets in touch with cnn legal. 2 weeks later, we get a cease & desist [takedown] letter. We take the video down.”
Also, “Viacom has altered its own videos to make them appear stolen.” Indeed, Google says that a former president of MTV, not named, testified that Viacom didn’t take down clips from The Daily ShowThe Colbert Report because “we were concerned that Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert believed that their presence on YouTube was important for their ratings as well as for their relationship with their audience.” and
This makes you wonder what will be the judges final ruling after hearing that, while Viacom’s lawyers were issuing takedown notices, its marketers were putting clips up on YouTube to promote Viacom movies and TV shows.
