Viacom vs. Youtube… and Viacom?
Back in 2007, media giant Viacom launched a lawsuit against Youtube for allegedly violating copyright when users posted clips of Viacom properties to the video sharing site. Normally, the procedure for determining the rights goes a little something like this…
Person posts a clip to YouTube. Copyright owner tells YouTube to remove it. Person can challenge this with a letter. YouTube re-instates the video until the legalities are sorted out. This is generally the standard operating procedure in most cases.
Zahavah Levine, chief counsel for YouTube has posted an article on the whole Viacom vs. YouTube thing over at their official blog, and there’s a couple of paragraphs that just have to be shared…
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. [from YTblog]
I guess that’s what you get when you try to orchestrate a faux-viral campaign. One doesn’t have to be a legal expert to find this more than a little amusing. Of course, the legal counsel for Viacom probably isn’t laughing.
[via Daring Fireball]
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