It was only a matter of time before one of the majors fell far enough out with Google’s YouTube before a legal action was filed, and after Viacom’s recent request for YouTube to remove 100,000 of its copyrighted pieces of video from its site, it was always odds on that the first suit would come from that quarter.
Last month Viacom, long criticized for not doing enough to maximize revenues from internet partnerships, signed a major new content deal with Joost, the TV over internet service being launched by three time Peer to Peer pioneers Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis.
And perhaps it was that deal with Joost that has tipped Viacom over the edge, finally realizing that it didn’t have to put up with piracy in order to get revenues from the net.
Despite promising to offer copyright filtering technology, YouTube has dragged its heels, and whereas rival MySpace has managed to rapidly adopt filtering to stop the uploading of copyrighted works, we asked the question a few weeks ago, what exactly would there be left of YouTube if it went ahead and cut all copyright materials.
Viacom filed its case this week in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, asking for $1 billion in intentional copyright infringement damages and an injunction stopping Google and YouTube from continuing to infringe copyright. Whether it gets its damage claim or not will depend largely on what Google and YouTube do from here.
Viacom has raised the number of clips that breach its copyright to 160,000 which it says have been viewed more than 1.5 billion times. If that’s right then 66 cents for each instance is a feasible claim, and YouTube might only mitigate such damages by responding rapidly now and removing all of the clips and accelerating technical remedies to keep them off.
YouTube has been cited in the US press as offering to put in place copyright filters, but only for those content companies that signed a distribution deal with it for content, a tactic which has been decried as blackmail. This has led to CEO Eric Schmidt publicly stating that this tactic was not being used with his permission and that copyright filters would be available to everyone but were not ready yet.
A Viacom statement said ‘YouTube is a significant, for-profit organization that has built a lucrative business out of exploiting the devotion of fans to others’ creative works in order to enrich itself and its corporate parent Google. Their business model, which is based on building traffic and selling advertising from unlicensed content, is clearly illegal and is in obvious conflict with copyright laws. In fact, YouTube’s strategy has been to avoid taking proactive steps to curtail the infringement on its site, thus generating significant traffic and revenues for itself while shifting the entire burden ‘ and high cost ‘ of monitoring YouTube onto the victims of its infringement.’
If there is money to be made in legal actions the other studios, at least those that have not yet signed a deal with YouTube, will not be far behind and we can expect that the fight to accelerate a ‘clean’ and above board business model for YouTube will take on the same shape as those legal actions that brought P2P filesharing firms to their knees.
Viacom made the point that it has been conducting negotiations in good faith with YouTube, but that it has been unable to get its content off the service.
Recently YouTube cut content deals with the BBC and this week signed content from Spanish TV network Antena 3, but has been less able to build relationships with the more suspicious US major content owners.