Viacom tired of YouTube and Google

According to Reuters , on Tuesday, media giant Viacom filed a lawsuit against Google and its video service YouTube, in which he accused them of a flagrant violation of copyright laws and demanded compensation for their losses in the amount of $ 1 billion.



After in February, Viacom officially demanded that 100,000 video clips belonging to it be removed from YouTube’s servers, she counted 160,000 more clips, TV shows and popular TV shows that filled the service pages again. Indeed, the search for fresh South Park series or, for example, a music video from VH1 today will not take long. According to the calculations of specialists of the corporation, together they were viewed more than one and a half billion times.



This time, Viacom decided to refrain from "excessive politeness" and expressed its opinion on the activities of YouTube, not stinging on unflattering definitions. The statement alleges that most of the content of a social resource consists solely of materials posted there in violation of the law. The strategy of the site administration is still based on the possibility of not interfering in this “ugliness”, which the corporation considers to be criminal inaction, for which it must be severely punished.

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There is no doubt that YouTube will make concessions this time and remove counterfeit materials. Actually, the company has repeatedly expressed its readiness to take such steps at the first request of the right holders and, apparently, is not going to refuse these words. However, the prospect of parting with a billion dollars is clearly not happy with the new owner of the service, so that the upcoming trial promises to be interesting.



Among the main arguments in its defense of Google, especially, is pushing the fact that YouTube’s rules prohibit placing pirated videos on it and, therefore, all responsibility lies on users. YouTube is presented here as a simple file storage. However, in order to see that this argument is seriously lame, one does not have to be a super-informed expert. This file storage indexes the materials to be added to it and creates convenient tools for searching by keywords that do not reveal copyright infringement, which means that its administration has everything it needs to be aware of what exactly it holds.



Thus, YouTube places obviously illegal materials on its servers and knows this very well. These materials later diverge throughout the Internet through many convenient and thoughtful channels, on the creation of which the founders got their first popularity.



It is also no secret that the main revenue from YouTube advertising is received on pages containing not a home video, intended for viewing by a narrow circle of people. So the amount of $ 1 billion fine for a company, the value of which, according to some estimates, now ranges from $ 2 to $ 5 billion, does not seem so oddly huge. And even if Google immediately introduces a hard content filtering, it will not compensate the losses already incurred by the right holders.



As a result, the logic of Viacom from a purely legal point of view, the author seems much stronger, although it is based on far from perfect laws governing the current state of affairs in the field of copyright. Since the lawsuit has not yet reached Google, the court date is not yet known. But, I repeat, this event is worth the wait and we will of course follow him.