FolkRockFan, perhaps youtube's plan was to be famous and then to sell it quickly before sues, namely, viacom sue against youtube (google is the actual owner now).

It is pretty obvious that youtube latest owners had a plan, and that was to earn as much money as they could and then sell it to the highest bidder, that makes completely sense to me actually.

Besides, even if youtube had the same original owners, they must have thought that they would earn more money then money loosed in the court of law with sues from any copyrighted material used on their website.

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RedAlert, i know that it is my mistake to put the dollar simbol and the dollar word, forgive me!

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BooZker, we are having much more subjects for discussion besides viacom sue against youtube, we are having a discussion also related to my "sort of" questions i inserted on my first port of this topic of mine, check it out:

duh there doing it for money lol
but, i saw something about this on either stephen colbert or daily show.
it was pretty funny, and if googles going to buy out youtube, then they should enforce the laws bestowed upon them.
its google's fault, and they should lose in my opinion.

Am I alone in being baffled by this lawsuit? First of all, Intellectual Property and the Daily Show et al??? Uhm...evidently the folks at Viacom haven't even been watching their own programming, because if they HAD, then they'd realize that the Daily Show and all of its related spin-offs are neither Intellectual nor Property. LOL. I kid, but people...c'mon! They're the most vapid (albeit extremely entertaining) faux news shows on the air! Saturday Night Live actually started that whole genre of comedy...and, frankly, they were better at it. But I digress.

If you want a product (and that's all we're talking about here is product) to be successful, especially wildly successful, then you have to MARKET IT! You have to shove it down the throats of 250+ million Americans morning, day and night and create an atmosphere where they think they'll die if they don't watch the next airing. Now...you can spend hundreds of millions of dollars advertising on regular network TV and other cable TV stations to try and lure people in...but, let's face it, the American public is now savvy to 99.99% of advertising gimmicks and keeping their attention for longer than 10 seconds is brutally difficult....until, that is, YOU TUBE came along!!

Now you have this MONSTER merchandising mechanism that costs you NOTHING and lures 10s of millions of people to the "product" each and every day...and ALL FOR FREE! Not a penny has to be doled out. So WHAT, I ask you, WHAT is the problem here!!???

Now, I admit that YouTube sooner or later is going to get smashed fat, dirty and hard by the MPAA because of GROSS violations with respect to the movie/dvd industry. They really need to get that under control and fast. But VIACOM??? Where the hell does Viacom even BEGIN to have a case?? They're contesting You Tube's offerings of broadcast TELEVISION SHOWS for Christ's sake...shows that are RECORDED on Tivo, Comcast digital services, VCRs (yes, people still have VCRs) etc. We have been recording TV shows for later viewing since the beginning of TIME and no one ever said BOO about it. WHY?? Because fewer than 1% of broadcast television ever goes to syndication, which is where easily downloaded content from the internet might be a problem. But we're not talking about that here. We're talking about shows that are extremely time sensitive and NO ONE is going to be interested in a month from now, never mind longer periods of time. I mean, seriously, is anyone interested in seeing the old shows featuring jokes about the President with Clinton was in office? It's not relevant, uninteresting and NOT funny.

This is just totally BS. It seems that Viacom is only interested in opening the door for other lawsuits against YouTube and its clones with regards to more lucrative ventures like movies and other recordings that are highly profitable. They're doing this on principle to set and example and try to put a dent in the internet download fiasco. Sadly, the author of the DMCA recently admitted that all enforcement attempts have failed and the entertainment industry has failed to keep up with the technological challenges now faced by perveyors of real intellectual property...and that's REALLY where they need to be focusing their attention now!!

Even if Viacom wins here, they still fail....the content they're trying to protect can't be protected due to all of the aforementioned avenues for recording it and playing it back...and there are WAY too many clones of You Tube out there right now to make it fiscally responsible to continue suing people to achieve their goals. All they'll accomplish in the end is alienating the very folks they want watching their shows! They should be kissing Google's BUTT and THANKING them for creating one of the most inexpensive marketing tools in the history of recorded media, and finding a way to leverage the technology to remain profitable and allow their show folks to make a living.

pfooey

humanisfilth, it is not that simple.

First of all and last, Viacom is the proper legal owner of the shows that youtube use to get massive visitors without a proper licence or even an authorization from Viacom, which is the owner of those products.

Even if Viacom is only winning/earning money with youtube, even so, they have the right to stop youtube using their products without even a word, and that is the problem, youtube does not have respect for anyone's products, they just have respect for money, for the profit, and that is why youtube (google corporation) will loose "big time"!

Well it is obvious thing thAT they release that there are many videos on their site which in fact are posted there without permission of their legal owners.

But it is hardly that site administrators know which clips are posted there without licence and which ar enot . Also I would like to point out that there are tools which delete videos from the website in case that it shows original material and by this they cannot be sued and I think that they will lose because youtube had secured themselves from such lawsuites and I think this is making them more popular then advertising.

Also I think that you tube will soon stop its existance and that we will all have to transfer to the google videos which in fact is project by google.

Didn't Google just make a few billion dollars in just a few hours? I'm sure their pockets can handle it.

I think they will, i mean, they are clearly doing something illegal.
i have noticed that a lot of videos have been removed due to copyright violations.
infact, i never use youtube any more, not because they got rid of lots of videos, but because removed videos, but because the videos load, and start to buffer, before you find out "this video i no longer available"
Meaning, you may have to look at ten different vides, to find one that is actually there.

I dont think it is fair to say that google dont care.
If you imagine the huge amount of videos uploaded every day, it would not be possible, or plausible to have them all checked before upload, as they probably have atleast a week of video uploaded every day (most likely more)

I really have mixed feelings about this situation that is going on.

To start off with, I completely understand why they would want to sue Google. Copyrights are being broken, true, and along with this it is Youtube's fault for not ensuring that copyrighted material is not on their server. Who owns the server? Youtube. Therefore it *is* their sole responsibility to ensure that they are not breaking laws.

To break out a comparison, although quite extreme, it's like you hosting a party at your house and then someone(you don't know who) leaving their drugs under your rug or in your couch. The police aren't going to accept the "it isn't mine" story because it *is* yours by the basis that it is on your property.

That is exactly the same as Youtube. Anything that is on their server is their responsibility and nobody else's.


On the other hand, you have the fact that Youtube would not be where it is today were it to be much more constricted in terms of the media being posted on their site. The only real way to fix the issue would be to have each video screened ahead of time, which honestly would require too much time and manpower.

Along with this, people could argue the fact that the users are the ones breaking the laws, and not the site. The site isn't the one uploading things, and instead it is the users.

BUT....Youtube's software *is* converting the files. So in a sense Youtube *is* taking part in the uploading of the copyright materials.


Don't get me wrong, I love Google, and like everyone else I also enjoy going to Youtube every once in a while, but I can see where people's issues are stemming from. It really makes me happy that I'm not part of Google,