Viacom Sues Google/YouTube

Entertainment giant, Viacom (owner of such names as MTV and Nickelodeon) is suing Google for “massive copyright infringement” over the use of copyrighted video material on Google-owned YouTube.com. Viacom is seeking in the region of $1 billion in damages.

In its complaint, Viacom makes some very strong statements, such as

[s]ome entities, rather than taking the lawful path of building businesses that respect intellectual property rights on the Internet, have sought their fortunes by brazenly exploiting the infringing potential of digital technology. YouTube is one such entity.

In the complaint, Viacom also claims that YouTube.com contains over 150,000 video clips of their copyrighed material.

In my opinion, go Viacom!! They are certainly correct in asserting that YouTube.com is infringing the rights of many, many copyright holders and I think this will end up being a landmark case in ensuring that intellectual property rights in digital materials are honored on the Internet. I can't wait to see how the case develops!

You can read more details of Viacom v. YouTube on Findlaw.com.

Google Donating to Stanford CIS

According to an article in the San Jose Business Journal, Google has pledged to donate $2 million to the Center for Internet & Society at Stanford Law School.

The quotes in the article imply that this money will be used for issues related to intellectual property and copyright in particular. Given that Google seems to be having quite a few issues regarding copyright and trademarks at the moment, (e.g. the Google News copyright decision in Belgium, reports that that Google has put aside a large pot of money to cover copyright issues arising from its acquisition of YouTube, issues arising from its indexing of print publications, being sued in France over a video download/copyright infringement, etc.) this seems very appropriate.

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