Google to Viacom: All Your Base Are Belong To Us

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.

Related:
Larry Neumiester, AP
New York Times Plans Content API

Ebay v. Craigslist: Details Are Now Public

Ebay has released details of its complaint against Craigslist, somewhat ironically a company in which Ebay has a substantial equity stake. That equity is critical to the lawsuit, which in a nutshell is about how Craigslist responded to Ebay's entry into the classified market with their listings website called Kijiji. That response was a reorganization that effectively took away Ebay's right to have a seat on the Craigslist board due to stock dilution.

New York Times Summary

Ebay Complaint

World of Warcraft Lawsuit: No Bots Allowed!

In an ironic virtual world twist the makers of one of the world's most popular and lucrative massively multiplayer games, World of Warcraft, are suing a programmer for creating a "bot" that automates many game playing skills.

Issues like this will become more common as more time and money flow into the virtual world, and it is not clear how courts will interpret old 'static media' rules within the context of the many supercharged, dynamic, and very financially lucrative online environments.

Dan reports at CNET

Personal Blogs, Corporate Lawsuits

Cisco is facing a lawsuit after an employee - who happend to be in charge of Cisco's Intellectual Property Division - criticized other companies on his personal blog. The companies that came under fire are now suing the company, claiming the employee should have disclosed his Cisco affiliation.

Anne at CNET wonders today if a new spate of blog lawsuits may be coming as employees are increasingly given, and taking, the freedom to discuss company issues. My guess is that companies have little to worry about. Several prominent bloggers have been talking about their companies for years with few detrimental effects and many positive ones. Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo has both complimented and criticized Yahoo many times in his long blogging career.

Rather than hurting the company this level of transparency arguably helps with credibility and gives readers the kind of "reality check" that official corporate blogs cannot provide. Other prominent personal bloggers who became something of the de-facto company bloggers are Matt Cutts at Google and Jeff Barr of Amazon, though more recently the companies have established their own blogs, Google on a very large number of Google related topics.

Corporate blogging advocate Robert Scoble in his book with Shel Israel called "Naked Conversations", argues that companies should encourage personal blogging as well as establish corporate blogs as part of their media strategy to engage with customers on a more personal and more detailed level than simple advertising will provide. I think this is the best advice for the long term, and that lawsuits will be few and far between.