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.

Is You-Tube's Revenue-Sharing Plan A Threat To Cable?

YouTube's announcement that it has plans to create a revenue-sharing agreement with the contributors to the popular website is eerily not being discussed by the 'traditional media' even as YouTube has become an Internet sensation and a household name.

Is YouTube's latest move yet another a nail in the prepped coffin of mainstream television and cable programming?

As more information, videos, photographs, music and so on premiere on the Internet first nowadays - including announcements from presidential candidates - even regularly scooping mass media organizations on important news, there seems to be no way to stop the decline of traditional media. Can you stop a slip and slide that is in full motion? I doubt it.

In a few years, just about anyone will be able to report over the Internet on breaking news - they only need be in the right place at the right time and have a modern cell phone, which increasingly offer quality, real-time video.


The media cannot be everywhere, but the millions of people who post to the Internet can be. That's going to be the fundamental difference, as it is already playing out.

I remember telling friends and family back in 1995 that the Internet will revolutionize not just commerce, but that it would find its way into every nook and cranny of ordinary life. One classmate told me that I was crazy after I predicted the majority of people would eventually get their music from the Internet and that record stores were at peril. (I'm not saying I'm a fortune teller, it just seemed the natural progression at the time).

Just like I'll say right now that video stores will disappear as well and the majority of people will download their movies on the Internet and have the ability to watch them on their televisions, big-screens, iPods, computers, and so on. Services such as Vongo.com and Movielink.com are the seeds of this revolution.

The Internet continues to change almost everything we do (except buy groceries, sorry PeaPod). It was simply the natural progression of a relatively easy and accessible technology with broad exposure to get your message out for very little money (in comparison to, say, newspaper and magazine publishing).

Ordinary people, like bloggers, programmers, artists and users of the Internet are setting the trends for news reporting, entertainment, communications, commerce, fashion, business, social networking, banking and finance, and the list goes on.

How will television as we know it fit into the enormous Internet culture of bloggers, web sites, online media and so on? This has been a question for years and now seem more of a threat than ever before. TV has suffered (except for American Idol), especially local news programming, and most especially those that have been in denial and not provided a web alternative to their newscasts or print editions. There is 24/7 access to anything anyone wants to read, watch, listen to or download.

How many people will abandon their cable companies because they can more easily, cheaply and quickly get whatever they want commercial-free from the Internet (connected to a TV or Widescreen) when they want and how they want. CNN Pipeline at $2.95 a month is one fine example.

A decade ago, Microsoft introduced what was touted as a revolution in the history of online media, claiming it would change how every household uses the Internet and television.

Remember WebTV?

The service allowed subscribers to surf the Internet on their televisions. However, the service was clumsy and unreliable, and therefore never gained the popularity anticipated by Bill Gates and others at Microsoft.

Most damaging to the WebTV model was probably the approach MS initially used, luring people into accepting it's model (or vision) for the future of Internet and computer use. It was, at its best, a novelty.

But in the last decade, the Internet has become a mass communication channel - the most extensive, widely-used and globally significant communications device in the history of mankind.

So it shouldn't be a surprise that the natural progression of technology-on-demand is the future, and the industries involved will need to adapt or be replaced.