Hot off the press Viacom slams Google and YouTube with $1billion lawsuit.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17593962/ http://www.itwire.com.au/content/view/10425/1103/
From
http://www.viacom.com/view_release.j...leaseID=227614 Quote:
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NEW YORK, March 13, 2007 – Viacom Inc. (NYSE: VIA and VIA.B) today announced that it has sued YouTube and Google in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York for massive intentional copyright infringement of Viacom’s entertainment properties. The suit seeks more than $1 billion in damages, as well as an injunction prohibiting Google and YouTube from further copyright infringement. The complaint contends that almost 160,000 unauthorized clips of Viacom’s programming have been available on YouTube and that these clips had been viewed more than 1.5 billion times.
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Interesting, their defense has for sometime been that they make the user or member responsible for copyright. The onus is on the video maker or person who loads it up. There's a standard way of getting the video removed but at the end of the day they are the broadcaster of copyrighted content and will be getting hammered for it.
This is a good case to watch coz it's all about what the internet has become. It's just so easy to copy something, a pic, video, text, documents etc. Did you know even posting links to stuff could be seen as a breach of copyright? Also, say you see a video, copy it and host it yourself exactly as you found it with full credits etc to the owner it is still wrong to do that.
Might be good to see how these giants battle it out and what happens. I can see a boom of recognition software and possible internet registration of works to protect lawful owners. Something will change here for sure.