As the Viacom Google legal battle over YouTube clip copyright issues intensifies Google has tried to knock the rhetorical ball back into Viacom’s court stating today in papers filed with the judge that Viacom:

“threatens the way hundreds of millions of people legitimately exchange information, news, entertainment and political and artistic expression.”

In a nutshell the suit is a claim by Viacom that Google owned and controlled YouTube has remained very lax regarding the upload and distribution of copyrighted materials owned by Viacom, and that this has led to diminished revenues for Viacom, and that the appropriate legal remedy is for Google to pay Viacom

…One Billion Dollars….

Austin Powers aside the issues behind this case have enormous significance and the ruling - if there ever is legal closure to this case - will shape online content strategies for many years to come.

As with most high stakes, complex legal disputes it is easy to point to a number of virtues and defects with the logic of each side. Google’s own concerns about copyrighted material on YouTube when it was purchased for 1.6 Billion led Google to allocate approximately 400 million of that amount to the settlement of lawsuits like Viacoms. But Google can also note how many clips they have removed, and how much better policed the YouTube environment is now than in the days before Google. For their part, Viacom’s claims of great revenue loss are probably without much merit given that they need to suggest there has been a significant shift away from viewing popular shows on TV to viewing unauthorized versions of those shows online AND that this has led to a loss of the money Viacom should have made. Monetizing online video is still problematic and it seems fairly unlikely that pirated clips represent much if any shift in revenue away from Viacom.

Viacom can make a strong case that online activity by many YouTubers as well as many others is inconsistent with copyright law as it is written, and that Google has done only a modest level of upload policing, and that Google has to know there are many copyrighted clips still flowing online regularly. How the judge handles all this is anybody’s guess, though there appear to be more precendents for “cracking down” on copyright infringement than precendents where the courts have recognized that we are currently in a transition phase that will completely rewrite the rules of publishing as they relate to online activity.

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