Viacom Files Complaint Against YouTube and Google Over Videos

After a year of intense criticisms and threats of lawsuits against YouTube for sponsoring user-submitted video clips on its website, mega-media conglomerate Viacom, Inc. filed a complaint in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

In the complaint, Viacom alleges that approximately 160,000 video clips of Viacom's entertainment programming have been posted to YouTube on a near-daily basis, resulting in more than 1.5 billion incidents when someone viewed an unauthorized video from a Viacom owned program, such as Comedy Central's Colbert Report. Viacom also owns Paramount Pictures, MTV, Dreamworks and other cable channels nationwide.

"YouTube appropriates the value of creative content on a massive scale for YouTube's benefit without payment or license," Viacom said in its complaint. "YouTube's brazen disregard of the intellectual-property laws fundamentally threatens not just plaintiffs but the economic underpinnings of one of the most important sectors of the United States economy."

But Google disagrees responding to the complaint in a statement.

"[We] are confident that YouTube has respected the legal rights of copyright holders and believe the courts will agree.

"YouTube is great for users and offers real opportunities to rights holders: the opportunity to interact with users; to promote their content to a young and growing audience; and to tap into the online-advertising market. We will certainly not let this suit become a distraction to the continuing growth and strong performance of YouTube and its ability to attract more users (and) more traffic, and (to) build a stronger community."

In its complaint, Viacom asked the court for an immediate injunction, holding the video submission websites accountable for allowing Viacom video clips to be posted on their websites.

YouTube started removing and placing disclaimers on Viacom content two to three months ago, but it's nearly impossible for the websites to track down and delete Viacom video, from music videos to segments from Comedy Central.

This author had a personal experience with this controversy a couple of months ago because there were hundreds of visitors to my other site (named for a Colbert segment, ironically) linking to the video segment in which Stephen Colbert jokingly (more like tongue-in-cheek) theorized that it would take 10 monkeys to type the Bible (not sure which version) in one weekend.

The filed complaint is a bold move against the number one video website on the Internet and a company - Google - that has tremendous influence, capital and sway in the Internet industry.

The debate of recycling of intellectual property without any regulations (such as use fees) on third-party websites is very much like the music industry's battle against shared music networks.

Stay tuned! I'll be covering this issue regularly on this site as events materialized.

Viacom Demands YouTube Remove Stephen Colbert Videos

Last summer, Stephen Colbert's show on Comedy Central, Colbert Report, ran a wacky and funny segment about how long it would take ten monkeys to type the bible.

During the fall of 2006, a website was named after the "monkey segment" as a blog portal featuring the best of weird, bizarre and unusual news, videos and pictures on the Internet.

Due to the wild success of Colbert Report, YouTube members were posting segments from the show almost daily, including popular segments such as "The Word" or the hilarious "Better Know A District," in which Colbert has made a mockery of, and humiliated, numerous Congressional representatives in one of the most talked about series of political interviews of the past year.

The question is: Why did YouTube, by then a part of Google, take down the video of that segment from the show?

Apparently, Viacom has contacted YouTube and demanded that they remove all Viacom programming from the YouTube website.

So far, it looks like Viacom's threat is working.

In fact, I found a Viacom video of a Colbert Report segment posted yesterday, and it had already been removed minutes later, with a red box on the page that the video was removed for potential copyright issues (be careful how you word that guys).

It must be that Viacom execs want people to go to the Comedy Central website to watch segments of the Colbert Report and any other Viacom-owned programming.

That makes total sense when you think about brand loyalty, marketing and advertising dollars, but is it a wise overall strategy to not allow fans of Viacom programming to post video segments on the wildly popular YouTube?

Perhaps Viacom views YouTube and companies like Google as a long-term threat to traditional broadcasting, which has been already happening for the past decade, especially as the trends in breaking news delivery, community journalism, blogging and instant access to news and information in seconds become the norm for news and entertainment consumers of all ages and backgrounds.

You can't blame Viacom for taking action when you also consider just how quickly Google and YouTube have become household words - without virtually any advertising. Now that's cost effective.

Google itself has become so common that it is now a verb as well ("to Google a friend") and President Bush made sure to create his own pronoun (Bushism #13,484 and counting) when he answered a reporter's question about using Google with the comment: "I've used The Google."

The president said he liked the satellite maps (Google Earth) because he could look at his ranch in Crawford, Texas. (We can't wait until you get back to the ranch permanently too, Georgie boy.)

So now that fans of Comedy Central cannot watch segments from shows on YouTube, fans of the Colbert Report will now need to go to Comedy Central to watch segments from his show if available (anyone who has tried to watch Colbert or John Stewart of the Daily Show have found to be either inaccessible due to server overload or just really slow).

The difficulty in accessing Viacom's site and the lack of user input as to the video contents is probably a couple of good reasons why they should reconsider and allow segments to be posted with some restrictions.

There may be other sites out there that are hosting these segments (and at this point I'd say at their own peril per this report), but a preliminary search on a number of search engines didn't turn up anything worthy.

My web logs also show that many visitors were clicking a link on the homepage ("How This Site Was Named") that redirected them to an address where there was the famous monkey segment which got thousands of hits on YouTube. In January, Viacom ordered YouTube to take the video down.

Well isn't that interesting? I assume you said yes, so I'll tell you why you said yes:

There are literally hundreds of videos from the Colbert show hosted on YouTube. Colbert himself joked about this very fact on his show back in November, demanding he receive 1/3 of the $1.3 billion Google paid for YouTube. That video segment is still up on YouTube.

Here's another twist: Sometime in the past week or so, YouTube changed the message on the page from "Viacom" to "third party." Interesting as well. Anyone have any insight into this matter?

NOTE: Anyone who would like to become an editor, contributor or lend content and links to any posts on TheGoogleBlogger.com, please contact me at sunmoonrain@gmail.com.

Has Google Blogger Publishing Tool Been Upgraded?

During the last few weeks, Blogger's publishing tool seems to have been upgraded.

After months of intermittent outages and long delays in publishing (and even a few outages), Blogger appears to have received an upgrade.

The problems started last summer when there were a number of hacks and outages of the Blooger publishing tool.

Blogger is publishing faster than even a couple of months ago, and the company has added a number of new features and services to Blogger, including dynamic tools for formatting a web page or blog and the ability to publish to your own domain.

Not a bad deal for anyone that wants an email account (although Gmail is currently closed to new members), blogger account, word processor and spreadsheet software tools, promotion and advertising services, calendar, email news alerts, maps, photo hosting, webmaster tools, and more.

A search of the Blooger blog did not unearth any news of the upgrade to the functionality of the publishing tool. (We just had an earthquake here in Los Gatos, CA in the Bay Area, it was fairly strong. The epicenter was Lafayette, CA, about 25 miles from here; my place shook and the windows and wood creaked and rattled and then it slowed down to a rolling affect. That was one of the strongest I've felt in 12 years of living here. It's the third in a week and people here are getting nervous. Google is also about 25 miles away from here and they felt it too. Anyways...)

But such tremendous growth and demand from computer users worldwide for access to Google's vast array of products and services will have its challenges.

One thing that would be great is if Google added to Blogger the auto-save feature used with Gmail.

In Blogger, you need to remember to Save As Draft (before you want to finally Publish), but with Gmail it runs a script to auto-save whatever email you are drafting just in case of a technical glitch, or more likely, a crash using Windows Explorer.

For now, just get in the habit of repeatedly clicking the Save As Draft button until you are ready to publish.

I'd love to hear from someone at Google about an auto-save feature for Blogger. From what I know of my work in the profession, it shouldn't be that difficult to apply the auto-save functionality for Blogger. Perhaps there it is just not on the engineering team's long, long list of priorities. Google hires something like 10 or 15 new engineers a week!

Some helpful Blogger resources:

Blogger Status page

Known Issues page

Blogger's newest features

Extraneous link: Tonight's official USGS eartquake report