• Oh boy, this is getting testy. YouTube and Viacom’s long-running lawsuit is still going on, and if anything, it’s heating up. On one side is Viacom, claiming the site was designed around copyright infringement. On the other is YouTube/Google, claiming that Viacom’s conduct suggests the company if full of hypocrites. Who’s right? Take a gander for yourself:

Viacom’s corner: “You’re stealing our stuff!”

• YouTube was intentionally built on infringement and there are countless internal YouTube communications demonstrating that YouTube’s founders and its employees intended to profit from that infringement.
• A statement from Viacom • Regarding what they feel is a culture of copyright infringement – a statement they released after documents from a lawsuit between the two firms became public today. Viacom first sued the Google-owned company in 2007 for $1 billion. They used old statements from the founders suggesting that they knew what they were doing – ripping off copyrighted content.

YouTube’s corner: “You guys are total hypocrites!”

• Viacom routinely left up clips from shows that had been uploaded to YouTube by ordinary users. … Executives as high up as the president of Comedy Central and the head of MTV Networks felt ‘very strongly’ that clips from shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report should remain on YouTube.
• YouTube Chief Counsel Zahavah Levine • Giving his take on the lawsuit and documents on the site’s blog. He argues that YouTube is following the “safe harbor” provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and Viacom themselves would send employees to a Kinkos for the singular purpose of uploading content to the site, going as far as “roughing up” the video to make it seem like it’s from a second-hand source. Oh, and allowing copyrighted video to just stay on the site. source

Posted by Ernie Smith • Permalink