YouTube law fight “threatens net”

[Karl]

BBC – May 27, 2008

A one billion dollar lawsuit against YouTube threatens internet freedom, according to its owner Google. Google's claim follows Viacom's move to sue the video sharing service for its inability to keep copyrighted material off its site. Viacom says it has identified 150,000 unauthorised clips on YouTube.

In court documents Google's lawyers say the action "threatens the way hundreds of millions of people legitimately exchange information" over the web. The search giant's legal team also maintained that YouTube had been faithful to the requirements of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act and that they responded properly to claims of infringement. In papers submitted to a Manhattan court, Google said it and YouTube "goes far beyond its legal obligations in assisting content owners to protect their works".

Viacom disagreed that either firm had lived up to that standard and said that they had done "little or nothing" to stop infringement. In a rewritten lawsuit filed last month, Viacom claimed YouTube consistently allowed unauthorised copies of popular television programming and movies to be posted on its website and viewed tens of thousands of times. It said it had identified more than 150,000 such abuses which included clips from shows such as South Park, SpongeBob SquarePants and MTV Unplugged. The company says the infringement also included the documentary An Inconvenient Truth which had been viewed "an astounding 1.5 billion times". Viacom, which is asking for damages for the unauthorised viewing of its programming, said its tally represented only a fraction of the content on YouTube that violates its copyrights.

Read Full Article: BBC NEWS | Technology | YouTube law fight 'threatens net'

[Corey]

Talk about censorship! I wonder if viocom is owned by a major energy or other major polluter who has a lot to loose with people knowing about the miss deeds that programs like inconvenient truth shares.......



I pulled this from wikipedia about viacom I give full credit to the source and in noway gain profit. It is used as sharing of educational information only

Paste as followed:

Copyright complaints against YouTube

In February 2007, Viacom sent upwards of 100,000 DMCA takedown notices to the video-sharing site YouTube, alleging large-scale copyright infringement. Of the 100,000, approximately 60 - 70 non-infringing videos were erroneously removed under the auspices of copyright infringement.[3]

On March 13, 2007, Viacom filed a US $1 billion lawsuit against Google and YouTube alleging massive copyright infringement, alleging that users frequently uploaded copyrighted material to YouTube - enough to cause a hit in revenue for Viacom and a gain in advertisement revenue for YouTube.[4]

The complaint contends that almost 160,000 unauthorized clips of Viacom’s programming have been available on YouTube and that these clips had collectively been viewed more than 1.5 billion times.

Controversial complaints

In 2007 Viacom, claiming copyright infringment, requested the removal of a Youtube video that contained a part of their show, Web Junk 2.0, which featured a video from Youtube that Viacom allegedly used without permission. Christopher Knight, the creator of the video, wrote in a blog post: "So Viacom took a video that I had made for non-profit purposes and without trying to acquire my permission, used it in a for-profit broadcast. And then when I made a YouTube clip of what they did with my material, they charged me with copyright infringement and had YouTube pull the clip. Folks, this is, as we say down here in the South, ‘bass-ackwards.'"[5] Knight subsequently filed a Digital Millennium Copyright Act counter-notification claim with YouTube. Two weeks later Viacom yielded to Knight and the disputed clip was restored.

PS link to source page
Viacom - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[Karl]

CNN – July 03, 2008

Dismissing privacy concerns, a federal judge overseeing a $1 billion copyright-infringement lawsuit against YouTube has ordered the popular online video-sharing service to disclose who watches which video clips and when.

U.S. District Judge Louis L. Stanton authorized full access to the YouTube logs after Viacom Inc. and other copyright holders argued that they needed the data to show whether their copyright-protected videos are more heavily watched than amateur clips. The data would not be publicly released but disclosed only to the plaintiffs, and it would include less specific identifiers than a user's real name or e-mail address.

Lawyers for Google Inc., which owns YouTube, said producing 12 terabytes of data -- equivalent to the text of roughly 12 million books -- would be expensive, time-consuming and a threat to users' privacy. The database includes information on when each video gets played, which can be used to determine how often a clip is viewed. Attached to each entry is each viewer's unique login ID and the Internet Protocol, or IP, address for that viewer's computer. Stanton ruled this week that the plaintiffs had a legitimate need for the information and that the privacy concerns are speculative…

Read Full Article: YouTube ordered to reveal its viewers - CNN.com