Never before have consumers been so on the side of a big software company, quite so much as users are on the side of Google. This stands out in the legal action against Viacom, where Viacom is claiming $1 billion of damages, and which recently convinced a High Court judge that he should get Google to hand over tons and tons of YouTube video search data.
The reaction from highly vociferous Google fans is largely that Google can be trusted with that data, but no-one else can and that even by cutting off the identification data, the evil Hollywood company will somehow work out who has carried out what searches and somehow identify them and that this data will leak all over the internet. Google fans in their thousands have been sending video nasties to YouTube, expressing their anger at Viacom executives.
My personal searches on YouTube aren’t so interesting, and we suspect that most other people’s searches are not worth breaking US privacy laws for, in order to pry. But privacy is not the issue here as everyone is saying, it’s money, and whether or not YouTube has any kind of future..
Buying YouTube, we always said, was a mistake by Google. Initially we argued that this was because it overpaid, but increasingly we feel that the company has no viable video business model, and so it might turn out.
Google’s popularity with web consumers has gone through the roof, because YouTube has become the ‘Cause C’l’bre’ of the common man, to replace the P2P file sharing, now officially illegal, and frowned upon, but still happening. The 160,000 or so Viacom copyrighted clips which have at various times sat on YouTube are just the equivalent in video of the music tracks that were pirated on P2P.
Viacom has made it clear that it does not plan to identify and sue any individuals which have uploaded content, and will only use the data to prove its case against Google. Now we’re a little confused here on two points. Firstly how does Viacom plan to sort through this colossal amount of data, how will it summarize it and measure the extent of the damage it has been caused, and secondly if Google has genuinely implemented its own technology for stopping copyrighted material being loaded onto its site, and if that software can be proved to work, then what’s the fuss about? By oing that it has mitigated the damages it must pay, if any, for originally not doing enough to prevent copyrighted material getting up on YouTube, and if, as Google claims it has complied with all takedown notices, within the spirit and letter of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, then that’s really all that the judge has to decide upon.
Now we understand that Viacom really only wants to get a feel for how many people spent how long on the Viacom content, and it doesn’t trust Google to provide that data in summary. We have heard many times that these have been viewed more than 1.5 billion times, in which case that is likely to lead to a pretty low level of damages, given that the average viewing time of a YouTube video is short, and that when a broadcaster pays for a piece of Viacom content, they might then broadcast it to an audience of tens of millions creating that much viewing on one program.
But of course this is a fraction of the viewings that YouTube achieves, cited at around one billion video views on most days, but this has brought in very little revenue for Google, expected to be $200 million for the year when Google reports, apparently way below the internal estimate. This is the real problem for Google, people don’t want to advertise on something that has a legal action or any dubious morality hanging over it, potentially to the wrong audience.
However the Viacom legal action is likely to set the US rules for running a video site on the internet, and the resulting piece of case law is likely to provide the legal basis for an entire industry (or kill that industry). Which is why the result of this trial is likely to be irrelevant, because both sides are going to push this to appeal all the way to the US Supreme Court, whatever users think.