So a lawsuit walks into a bar…
March 14th, 2007Author: DialogueMedia
I’ve been trying since the news broke to wrap my head around the $1 billion lawsuit filed by Viacom against YouTube. The nearest I can figure is that they studied all the reactions to the RIAA suing random college students for music downloading and decided that, hey, any press is good press so we’ll adopt an even more outrageous business strategy.
I say that because this lawsuit is only partly between Viacom and YouTube/Google. It’s also between Viacom and the general population, basically saying, “We don’t like you playing with out toys, so we’re suing the company that owns the playground.”
There are bigger points to be made, and others have made them well prior to me, but I think that any time a company gets in the way of people sharing their content it can disrupt and impede the conversation that’s going on and shut down those yet to come before they even begin. There needs to be a way that media companies can work with sites like YouTube that doesn’t stop people from uploading their own videos but also might allow for the company to act as the gateway, so to speak, for people to get to those videos.
I’m not advocating content theft at all. Companies and artists have a right to make money off of what they produce. But there’s a world of difference between downloading a pirated copy an episode of “Reno: 911″ and someone posting a 32-second clip that someone finds funny. One is theft – there’s no disputing that in my mind. The other is a way that a community can talk amongst itself and potentially promote the property to others. If they work at it, I think media companies can find ways to work with this community and not rail against it.
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