Viacom secretly uploading own content to YouTube then demanding it be removed

[Ian David]

Broadcast Yourself

Around the globe, YouTube has become a metaphor for the democratizing power of the Internet and information. YouTube gives unknown performers, filmmakers, and artists new ways to promote their work to a global audience and rise to worldwide fame; makes it possible for political candidates and elected officials to interact with the public in new ways; enables first-hand reporting from war zones and from inside repressive regimes; and lets students of all ages and backgrounds audit classes at leading universities.

Yet YouTube and sites like it will cease to exist in their current form if Viacom and others have their way in their lawsuits against YouTube.

In their opening briefs in the Viacom vs. YouTube lawsuit (which have been made public today), Viacom and plaintiffs claim that YouTube doesn't do enough to keep their copyrighted material off the site. We ask the judge to rule that the safe harbors in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (the "DMCA") protect YouTube from the plaintiffs' claims. Congress enacted the DMCA to benefit the public by permitting open platforms like YouTube to flourish on the Web. It gives online services protection from copyright liability if they remove unauthorized content once they’re on notice of its existence on the site.

<snip>

For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site. It deliberately "roughed up" the videos to make them look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube accounts using phony email addresses. It even sent employees to Kinko's to upload clips from computers that couldn't be traced to Viacom. And in an effort to promote its own shows, as a matter of company policy 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.

Viacom's efforts to disguise its promotional use of YouTube worked so well that even its own employees could not keep track of everything it was posting or leaving up on the site. As a result, on countless occasions Viacom demanded the removal of clips that it had uploaded to YouTube, only to return later to sheepishly ask for their reinstatement. In fact, some of the very clips that Viacom is suing us over were actually uploaded by Viacom itself.

More:
http://ow.ly/1pxYg

Hat-tip to: http://twitter.com/godlessgirl/status/10890380137

[MrScorpio]

1. More proof that corporations can be psychotic

No same person would do this shit

[RKP5637]

2. Psychotic Crooked Corporations! n/t

[Liberal_in_LA]

3. +1

[Festivito]

4. Ew. Thats fraud. Secretly uploading clips, then suing the site.

Oh boy, that judge is going to have a field day.

[dem mba]

6. my understanding is that Viacom uploaded

a few hundred clips all in all. YouTube users uploaded thousands of Viacom-owned clips and did not pay Viacom for any of the millions of views registered.

[dem mba]

5. so does that mean YouTube is in the "right" for all the thousands

and thousands of other Viacom owned videos it hosts on its site for free and without compensating Viacom? If you produced your own show, at your own expense, and with great effort given to make a quality product, you know what, you'd be pretty damn pissed that YouTube was making ad money off of your product too.

My ruling is that both parties were in the wrong. YouTube more so because they very easily could have filtered the Viacom-owned material and banned users who posted them. They chose to sit on their hands instead and for obvious reasons. YouTube and Google have TONS of cash and TONS of brilliant engineers. If they wanted to develop a technology to help copyright owners out, believe me, they could have.

Now, Viacom was certainly shady as hell with their uploading, but I know of no laws that they broke by doing that. Also, they would never have had to take such frantic actions had YouTube taken a harder line against copyright infrigers.

Your link goes to YouTube's official blog, so keep in mind you are getting only one side to this tricky issue.

[Xithras]

7. Yes Youtube is in the right. The DMCA spells out their responsibilities quite clearly.

They aren't responsible for what others do with their service. Their responsibility is simply to remove copyrighted content when it is found or requested.

If they're complying with takedown notices, they aren't doing anything wrong.

[dmr]

8. If Viacom uploaded material - so much material they lost track

of what was uploaded, then why isn't that nefarious? They claim one thing, then do another? If they had that much time and money on their hands, why didn't they just utilize that energy, cruise YouTube to find their content and ask for it to be taken down?

I don't think it's so much their content was available on YouTube as it is they're eyeing the deep pockets of Google.

They do themselves a disservice by not making a deal with YouTube, where they'd both benefit.