James Wilson –blog

We all knew this was coming, especially since Viacom was getting all uppity about it pulling 100k of their videos, starting their own video site, and then making a deal with Joost. So now, they've sued them for a cool $1 Billion. Nothing like a lawsuit being a nice round number instead of being an actual representation of damages done.

Let's look at their US District Court filing.

Page 1, Point 3

including such popular (and obviously copyrighted) television programming and motion pictures as “SpongeBob SquarePants,” “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,” “The Colbert Report,” “South Park,” “Ren & Stimpy,” “MTV Unplugged,” “An Inconvenient Truth,” “Mean Girls,” and many others.

Wait, Ren & Stimpy? Since when was that a popular show, and hasn't even been on the air for over 10 years, so how is this hurting them? O, that's right, dvd boxsets. They definitely have enough. If I want the whole series, it will only cost me a cool $100.97, and another $19.99 if I want the lost episodes, so now it's a cool $120.96. So I'm supposed to pay $120.96 if I want to watch a show that aired 10 years, that was only mediocre at the time? Nah, I think I'll just watch them on dailymotion instead. I'm sure collectors or big fans of that show will buy them, but the average person who remembers seeing it a long time ago and wanting to see it again definitely won't, and the collectors will buy them even if they can get the videos for free. Money lost: $0.

And Mean Girls? Sure, Lohan was really hot in that movie in both the attractiveness scale and her ability at math, but a popular movie that is costing Viacom millions of dollars? No way.

Page 3, Point 6

Because YouTube directly profits from the availability of popular infringing works on its site, it has decided to shift the burden entirely onto copyright owners to monitor the YouTube site on a daily or hourly basis to detect infringing videos and send notices to YouTube demanding that it “take down” the infringing works.

No, that's because of your fancy DMCA act (Yes, I know that is literally say Digital Millennium Copyright Act act, but it sounds better) I'm sure you support. By the looks of that, it looks like YouTube is following it perfectly.

Page 4, Point 8

YouTube allows its users to make the hidden videos available to others through other YouTube features like the “embed,” “share,” and “friends” functions.

I'm sure they're making millions by embedding a video into a page, since they are showing no advertising and just using bandwidth when a video is embedded.

Page 11, Point 32

To do this, the user simply copies the “embed” code, which YouTube supplies for each video in its library, and then pastes that code into the other website, where the embedded video will appear as a television-shaped picture with the YouTube logo prominently displayed and a triangular icon that any user can click to play the video. [emphasis mine]

Television shaped picture? O, you mean rectangular, since only TVs are 4×3 rectangles. And what about this whole HDTV thing you media people are so pushing? Aren't they supposed to have already replaced these old 4×3 TVs by now? Those embedded YouTube videos sure don't look like those TVs. And shouldn't you be confident enough that people want to see everything if full HD glory, and not watch it on some small, low quality stream. O wait, that's right, no one really wants HD.

Page 12, Point 34

But the videos that YouTube publicly performs and displays through the embed function to draw users back to YouTube’s own site are frequently the most popular copyrighted works created and owned by Plaintiffs, not YouTube.

Because YouTube doesn't own any of the videos it fucking hosts.
Straight from YouTube's Terms of Service:

For clarity, you retain all of your ownership rights in your User Submissions

Page 13, Point 37

Defendants profit handsomely from the infringement of Plaintiffs’ copyrighted works, and receive financial benefits directly attributable to the infringing activity.

Profit handsomely my ass. August of last year, YouTube had yet to turn a profit. Maybe after Google bought them, things could've gone up, but it's no where near profiting handsomely.

Page 16, Point 43

YouTube offers a feature that allows users to designate “friends” who are the only persons allowed to see videos they upload, preventing copyright owners from finding infringing videos with this limitation. YouTube has also recently limited the search function so that it identifies no more than 1,000 video clips for any given search. Thus, for example, if there are several thousand infringing clips from the “South Park” series on YouTube, the limitations YouTube has placed on the search function may prevent Plaintiffs from identifying all of the infringing clips.

First, if only a few friends can view the video, how is that really hurtful? It's like loaning someone a DVD, though I'm sure you think that's copyright infringement too. And have you ever heard of Google, you know, the owners of the site you're suing. You could try that for a change. Results 1 - 10 of about 269,000 from youtube.com for south park. Yes, it's so hard to find those infringing videos.

Hey Viacom, suck it