Trust the mainstream media to pile on the attacks once Viacom announced its lawsuit against Google. But I would have expected a little but better coverage from Dan Farber and ZDNet... As one of the comments to "You Tube's end game nears" points out:
If Google does indeed lose this suit, then the DMCA's Safe Harbor provisions are essentially worthless. This means that every single ISP, every search engine, every website that lets users submit content are now wide open for huge lawsuits. You can hear the lawyers now, sharpening their knives.
And this is the ridiculous part of the suit -- if Viacom doesn't like the mechanism that the federal government has established for protecting content owners, they should lobby for a change to the law, not sue law-abiding companies. Their complaint (as quoted in Computerworld from a Viacom statement) that YouTube's system is
shifting the entire burden -- and high cost -- of monitoring YouTube onto the victims of its infringement
flies directly in the face of the one welcome effect of DMCA -- that enforcement of copyright actually has a cost. That is, if you are going to benefit from the (ever extending) protections of copyright, then there is a cost associated with reaping those benefits.
That is not to say that companies should willfully engage in copyright infringement -- but rather that innovations like YouTube should not be stifled with the unfair burden that Viacom seemingly wishes -- that they be responsible for the way in which millions of consumers use their products. Content rights aggregators like Viacom have, throughout the history of technology, tried to create legal barriers to consumer's use of this technology -- cassette tapes, video tapes, mp3 players...
The fundamental business of rights aggregation is at risk. Suing Google for YouTube "infringement" is the content industry's equivalent of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic...
You write very well.
Posted by: Kiora | October 27, 2008 at 07:48 PM