YouTube is getting sued

Picture from www.youtube.com

You Tube and it's parent company Google are being sued with a £517 million lawsuit ($1 billion) by Viacom for copyright infringement of the clips available on You Tube for people to watch for free.

For those who don't know Viacom is the US media company that owns MTV and Comedy Central, and today they filed the law suit in New York, bringing the copyright argument between Viacom and Google to a head.

Viacom claims that they own the rights to over 160 thousand illegally uploaded clips on YouTube, and have being demanding for months that pirated clips are removed - Along with several other high profile companies such as Disney, Time Warner, and ABC.

I also read on Guardian.co.uk that Viacom released a statement attacking You Tube, saying it had; "built a lucrative business out of exploiting the devotion of fans to others' creative works in order to enrich itself and its corporate parent Google.''

I think that the whole thing is getting slightly out of hand now, I mean surely a line should be drawn on what is and isn't copyright infringement? Sure all those copyrighted music videos and tv show clips are uploaded, but in a lot of cases you can't actually buy them on dvd or people have being recommended a show and want to see what it's like first.

Also, with YouTube you are only viewing the clips, it's not designed as a watch and download site, so it's more like a large TV station with hundreds of chanels you can choose to watch than anything. If all these clips keep being removed I think it will it just mean less advertising for the companies in general and a huge increase on illegal downloads.

Plus I don't see a lot of these companies creating YouTube accounts and putting the clips up themselves - Sure CBS has an account and uploads things, but not like whole episodes or movies, etc... Of things that won't be released to DVD or haven't yet.

Anyway, I don't believe that YouTube 'exploits the devotion of fans', I think it's up to the people who own the copyright to help make their material accessable in the first place, so if it exploits anything, it's the weakness of the companies to supply for the demand in the changing technological world, etc... But that's just my opinion.


To read the full story go to Times Online or Guardian.co.uk.