catholicsphere

Viacom has asked YouTube to remove 100,000 videos which it says are copyrighted. YouTube complied with the request, but there are reports that some of the clips were personal home movies.

Just like the RIAA, Viacom doesn’t get it! See, Viacom and other television programmers are losing market share to broadband online content. Of course, they don’t like it, so they are going to go after those who are responsible — especially those who don’t have the resources to fight against them.

Google/YouTube is probably going to play nice only for so long … as they work out their place in the online content delivery market. They will look at all the applicable laws, put themselves in a strong legal position with content checking software, etc, and then finally say “no” to the “big boys” like Viacom, making them prove every alleged case of “infringement”.

There is a huge market there and Google is looking to take a big honkin’ chunk of it with its purchase of YouTube several months ago. I know of people who either have discontinued or are planning to discontinue their televisions service because of the availability of online content. Viacom doesn’t like that.

While I do agree that Viacom has the right to protect it’s content and enforce its copyrights, it simply cannot go out and force content that it does not own to be taken down in order to hurt sites like YouTube. In fact, Viacom is missing the point that many of these clips serve as free advertising of their shows … kinda like listening to 30 second snippets of songs on a CD before deciding to buy.

I’ll have more commentary on this later, because I think that the implications of this, along with piracy and sharing sites as the “social web” continues to evolve, are relevant to faith, morality and ethics development and issues.

[tags]viacom, youtube, google, ethics, web 2.0, faith, catholicsphere[/tags]