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.

British teenagers & gangs targeted by new gun laws

Picture copyright of

http://www.brentbrain.org.uk

As I scanned the headlines on the web, a story from Times Online stuck out in my head. It was about how Tony Blair has today announced that the government will be reviewing the laws and proposals for crimes involving guns, in particular making the minimum age someone can go to prison for being in pocession of a firearm 17 rather than 21 as it is now. - So as to discourage gangs from giving younger members guns.

The full story as reported can be found here.

Now, I totally agree that a crackdown on gun crime in the UK is the way to go, especially in the light of the rising amount of gun crime in London in recent weeks. However in the article Mr Blair is quoted as saying:

“It is about a specific problem within a specific criminal culture to do with guns and gangs, which doesn’t make it any less serious, incidentally, but I think it’s important therefore that we address that actual issue. How do we make sure that these groups of young people within these specific criminal cultures, who are getting into gangs at an early age and using guns, how do we clamp down on them very hard and provide solutions for that?”

I'm sorry but I really don't believe it's just a few misguided teenagers entering into gangs causing the problems - What about those smuggling them in in the first place, or manufacturing them here. Then there's the theives and drug racketeers, etc... It's not just people joinging gangs at a young age who are 'packing heat'.

But the fact remains that this is Britain, not America - Nobody should be packing heat except possibly special branches of the police.

It is probably easy to tell I am not Tony Blair's biggest fan, but I do agree with what he's doing, I just don't like the fact that he's putting all the blame onto today's youth, and not admitting that maybe if his labour government had been more tough on immigration and smuggling laws - As well as actually having a decent policy of 'Education! Education! Education!' like he was always banging on about, then maybe there wouldn't be any major problem with gangs now.

Tony Blair isn't even admitting that the plans to review the UK's gun laws have come because of the sudden influx of gun crime and murders hitting the headlines (Most occuring in London) in the past month or so. Because I'm pretty sure that if they hadn't happened, or more specifically hadn't happened in such a closed time period, Tony Blair wouldn't have made that announcement.

After reading the article I went on good old Google and I found the below chart from this page on the BBC news site.
Ok, technically this doesn't go up to 2006/7, but it does prove that Labour didn't do much to put a stop to the crimes being committed with firearms over their first term in power - Not that the figures the Tories left behind were great either.

I think today is actually one of the first times Tony Blair has properly and publically addressed the problem in any form, and even though I have no evidence in front of me to back this up, judging by the chart on my left, the gun crime figures for the present can only be even higher.

Now I don't know what those of you reading think about the story, or of the opinions and conclusions I have drawn from it, but I'm interested in hearing what others think, so leave a comment and tell me.