This is so ASTOUNDING, I hesitate to believe in it. First that Viacom, a huge movie/cable tv conglomerate and thus, presumably, a serious player in the market, would stoop so low–even if the partues responsible were only some rogue employees of some Viacom's subsidiaries; but even more than they/ whoever did this/ would for a moment imagine themselves getting away with it. Paraphrasing immortal words of David Letterman asking actor and she-teen wet dreamboat Hugh Grant–who went looking out for cheap sex in Hollywood, and got himself arrested instead–what were they ?thinking?
http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/18/viacom-youtube |
Ironic to see such a comment on this blog. Talk about stooping low. |
Ironic? Are you sure you understand the meaning of the word (within the broad confines of English common usage?) Or are you uncomfortable with my reaching for a metaphor that in some sense is about illicit sex. Perhaps you can enlighten us; pretend I'm stoopid. |
Irony by placement not content. Everything VIA can do GOOG can do better, for years, continuously and secretly. Wana know more? Ask Dory. |
That is not surprising at all. The strategy was to get as much traffic as possible (regardless of copyright infringements) and then to get acquired ...
I wish good luck to Google's lawyers but this is not looking good especially because of the emails exchanged between the founders. |
If I understood you correctly then, you object the very existence of the comment here, on assumption of the Blogoscoped website and/or its forum being part of global Google-centric commentariat – under the benign leadership-for-life of Philipp Lenssen, its High Commisar; his sidekick Roger Browne; and Leninesque obedient text-line soldiers such as myself? [I apologize for a multicausal sentence, couldn't find a way to chop it up into smaller 'uns.] |
![[put at-character here]](image/at.gif) Alex K
What emails are you referring to? Do you have any links? Thanks.
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but I would like to add that YouTube was a major milestone on the internet and for democracy. It let people have access to information they would never have had otherwise. To me the social usefulness of such a service is unprecedented and is much more important than some copyright infringements that may have occurred at the time. |
From Alex' link:
<<In a September 3,2005 email to the two other YouTube co- founders, YouTube co-founder Steve Chen responded to Jawed Karim’s suggestion that YouTube remove “obviously copyright infringing stuff’ (see SUF i156) by stating that “i know that if (we remove all that content. we go from 100,000 views a day down to about 20,000 views or maybe even lower. the copyright infringement stuff. i mean, we can presumably claim that we don’t know who owns the rights to that video and by uploading, the user is claiming they own that video. we’re protected by DMCA for that.we’ll take it down if we get a ‘cease and desist”‘; Jawed Karim replied: “my suggested polìcy is really lax though. . . . if we keep that polìcy I don’t think our views will decrease at alL. “ (...)
In a September 7, 2005 email, YouTube co-founder Steve Chen wrote to YouTube cofounders Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim, and Roelof Botha of Sequoia Capital (and later a YouTube board member) that YouTube had “implemented a flagging system so you can flag a video as being inappropriate or copyrighted. That way, the perception is that we are concerned about this type of material and we’re actively monitoring it. The actual removal of this content will be in varying degrees. We may want to keep some of the borderline content on the site but just remove it from the browse/search pages. that way, you can’t find the content easily. Again, similar to Flickr, . . . you can find truckloads of adult and copyrighted content. It’s just that you can’t stumble upon it, you have to be actively searching for it.”
In a January 25,2006 instant message exchange, YouTube co-founder Steve Chen (IM user name tunawarrior) told his colleague YouTube product manager Maryrose Dunton (IM user name maryrosedunton) that he wanted to “concentrate all of our efforts in building up (YouTube’sJ numbers as aggressively as we can through whatever tactics, however evil,” including “user metrics” and “views,” and “then 3 months, sell it with 20m views per day and like 2m users or something. . . I think we can sell for somewhere between $250m – $500m . . . in the next 3 months. . . and there *is* a potential to get to $1 b or something.”>>
One thing to keep in mind: posting copyrighted content does not, per US law, automatically equal a copyright infringement (i.e. not if it's fair use, for some reason, e.g. a noncommercial use of a very short clip for the purposes of commentary may be fair use, depending). |
So the (allegedly, to some) incriminating nature of these few emails, obtained by VIACOM [I presume] during the process of legal discovery and/or the US Freedom of Information Act, is supposed to offset and nullify their justice-skewing acts of surreptitious uploading of own material to YT to be able [I presume] to show off to the Court the irredeemable mentality of a company built on copyright infringement as a founding idea? Way to go.
Alex K. "YT a major milestone on the internet and for democracy" be damned. Where commercial interests, and then especially struggle for market share is concerned, tools for democracy weight little. We consumers are but pawns in the greater battle of media oligarchs' never-ending effort to win by dying with the most cultural-expression assets perpetually tied to their brands. "Can I turn a phrase or can I turn a phrase" [(c) me, myself and I.] |
As TechCrunch says, if YouTube strictly followed the DMCA rules, these emails might not be particularly relevant to the court case.
YouTube was successful where Google Video failed, and a major reason in my opinion was that YouTube welcomed and willingly hosted a much wider range of content. By doing so, YouTube created a user-uploaded video site that was useful and fun.
Alex K:
> It let people have access to information they would never have
> had otherwise. To me the social usefulness of such a service is
> unprecedented
Eloquently said. By hosting funny cat videos and the other relatively unimportant content, YouTube was able to create a platform that would also be successful for cultural content, educational content, historic content, etc. |
