This is absurd for a lot of reasons, but here are two of the more obvious:

1. A billion dollars in damages to Viacom? Ridiculous. Clips of their shows on YouTube amount to free advertising. Hasn’t anyone at Viacom paid attention to how YouTube has helped inject some much-needed interest into Saturday Night Live?

2. Viacom says YouTube “has built a lucrative business.” They have? Maybe I missed the memo, but everything I’ve seen and heard indicates that all those video clip views are generating a ton of bandwidth cost, but nary an ounce of profit.

In a purely legal sense, Viacom may be on shaky ground: Title II of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act seems to hold that YouTube is fine as long as they act in a timely manner to remove copyrighted material when Viacom alerts them to the existence of such material on their site.

Meanwhile, some portion of the 100,000 videos Viacom asked YouTube to remove have no relation at all to Viacom-controlled copyrighted material. This clip on YouTube, posted by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, tells the story.

Ultimately, traditional media and online media need to work together in a symbiotic relationship that benefits both. It’s starting to happen in the recording industry, it can happen in the broadcast industry.

Traditional media needs to lighten up and be a little less controlling, while online entities need to demonstrate they’re acting responsibly and in an online world that’s not a wild frontier anymore.

Lawyers, tend to your fighters: The bell has rung. Mouthpieces in. Spitbuckets in position. Let’s get ready to rumble!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 14th, 2007 at 7:43 am and is filed under Internet Stuff, Marketing Stuff.