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After months of ongoing discussions with YouTube and Google, it has become clear that YouTube is unwilling to come to a fair market agreement that would make Viacom content available to YouTube users," Viacom said in a statement. "Filtering tools promised repeatedly by YouTube and Google have not been put in place, and they continue to host and stream vast amounts of unauthorized video."Although loosing the Viacom deal was a serious blow to YouTube, not very many people expected this latest move. In an announcement made today, Viacom has sued both Google and YouTube in Federal Court in the southern district of New York.“YouTube is a significant, for-profit organization that has built a lucrative business out of exploiting the devotion of fans to others’ creative works in order to enrich itself and its corporate parent Google. Their business model, which is based on building traffic and selling advertising off of unlicensed content, is clearly illegal and is in obvious conflict with copyright laws. In fact, YouTube’s strategy has been to avoid taking proactive steps to curtail the infringement on its site, thus generating significant traffic and revenues for itself while shifting the entire burden – and high cost – of monitoring YouTube onto the victims of its infringement."Viacom's statement almost sounds like a lawsuit doctrine against any of the multitude of P2P networks sued out of existence. However Google/YouTube, unlike most P2P companies, is a multi-billion dollar enterprise capable of defending itself in court. While Google/YouTube may be able to defend itself, Viacom's latest move may only fuel an already established doubt regarding the viability of legitimate online video distribution
Sumner Redstone's Viacom, outraged at video grabs of programs such as the Daily Show, orders Google to remove more than 100,000 clips from its Youtube video sharing site. And then the 83-year-old media tycoon authorizes a $1bn lawsuit against the Mountain View search engine for "exploiting the devotion of fans" for its own enrichment. And why not, while Viacom's at it, sue other video sharing sites that offer copyrighted material, such as iFilm? Ah, awkward: that particular video hub is owned by -- you've guessed it -- a media conglomerate that just declared war on Youtube, Viacom itself.(Though we can understand why the aged mogul, who controls two separate media conglomerates with a mixture of movie, TV and internet units, might be confused.)
