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Viacom and YouTube’s copyright war escalates
A war of words between YouTube and Viacom is intensifying after court documents relating to Viacom's USD1bn copyright lawsuit against the video sharing site were made public. Viacom, which accuses YouTube of copyright infringement, claims YouTube's founders deliberately tried to profit from and "steal" infringing materials. YouTube counters that Viacom secretly uploaded content to the site in an effort to promote its own shows, making it impractical to respond to take-down requests.
Viacom, which first filed the suit in March 2007, argues that tens of thousands of videos on YouTube "were taken unlawfully from Viacom's copyrighted works, without authorisation". The firm alleges that YouTube acted deliberately, claiming that: "fostering and countenancing this piracy were central to YouTube's economic business model". Viacom likens the site to Grokster, a P2P filesharing client that was found liable for copyright infringement by the Supreme Court in 2005.
"YouTube's founders single-mindedly focused on geometrically increasing the number of YouTube users to maximize its commercial value," claims Viacom's court filing. "They recognised they could achieve that goal only if they cast a blind eye to and did not block the huge number of unauthorised copyrighted works posted on the site."
Viacom, which owns MTV and Nickelodeon, also cites email discussions between YouTube founders Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim. The emails allegedly refer to "truckloads" of copyrighted material on the site. "Concentrate all of our efforts in building up our numbers as aggressively as we can through whatever tactics, however evil," Chen is alleged to have written to his colleagues.
However, YouTube dismisses the argument and denies wrongdoing. A statement posted by YouTube's chief legal counsel, Zahavah Levine, claims that "Viacom's brief misconstrues isolated lines from a handful of emails" and accuses Viacom of "repeatedly" trying to buy YouTube, despite Viacom's claims that the site was "a haven of infringement".
YouTube says it is protected under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which keeps online services safe from copyright liability if they remove unauthorised content once they are notified of its existence on the site. It also points to its ContentID system, which scans video uploads and allows rights holders to monetise clips.
"For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there," claims Levine. "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."
"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,” claims YouTube. “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.”
The court documents, filed in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, also revealed for the first time details of the USD1.65bn Google buyout of YouTube. Backer Sequoia capital received USD516m of Google stock, while Hurley received USD334m worth of Google stock. Chen got USD301m and Karim USD66m.
