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Gootube We Hardly Knew Ye
The news about Google being hit with a $1B lawsuit over copyright infringement throws a bit of a monkey wrench into the froth over Web 2.0 and user-generated (*cough* stolen) content. One envisions the superannuated CEO Sumner Redstone rising from a creaky rocking chair on the porch of his antebellum mansion, Viacom, and shaking his walking stick at those disrespectful upstarts in New Media.
He’s right, of course. They built their business on facilitating dissemination of copyrighted material (going so far as to helpfully transmute uploads into a standard format and slap their logo on it) and have been, for some reason, dragging their heels on setting up licensing deals. Mark Cuban, who has a dog or two in this fight, has been [practically lactating] over the news. But it’s also the talk of the town over on Mike Arrington’s [Techcrunch] and at [Scobleizer]. Aside from the 20-year-olds yelling “Fuck Viacom”, the consensus seems to be that Google will either settle or lose. The question is, why did the “geniuses” at Google allow it to come to this point?
For oh about… 3 seconds I considered taking down the YouTube videos I’ve used on this siite. I don’t want to be complicit in theft. But I’d much rather pay a nominal fee to host the videos. That I don’t have the option to do so points right back at those Stanford-minted geniuses at Google.
Another reason I’m glad I went to Columbia…
Posted in Technology 03/16/07 | 
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1) Adobe will start charging royalties for using photoshop to create artwork.
2) Programmers are going to sue for using the intrawebpipes.
3) Crayola want’s a cut from those pictures I did when I was five….I made first place in the local fair and received a free roller-skating pass for the weekend.
The debate is Creativity vs. Context. People are paid for context not content ( the end result ). The pay to play model died a while ago.
Comment by Marc — March 25, 2007 @ 11:38 am
Marc,
If by “pay to play” you mean users paying a fee directly to rights-holders, you’re probably right. But there are many other ways for content owners to be compensated. I don’t think there has been a sea-change in rules of fair play — it’s just taken a while for the courts to catch up with the meteoric development of the internet and react to some of the more egregious abuses of copyright.
The Viacom-Google suit will help bring clarity.
Comment by Sprague D — March 25, 2007 @ 12:40 pm
I disagree. This is a fight for control. It’s easy to pass a law stating users cannot invoke a brand name, a product, or service without their respective owner’s permission. Let alone add, subtract or generally fuse the content with something else for the sake of communication. The internet is humanizing companies. Leveraging content and knowledge, if even on a superficial level, and the companies don’t want that.
In-fact, that’s exactly why we have corrupt newspaper journalists, fake news and paid-for-content ( sponsored ).
With stipulation of intent laws, we’ll have to refer to Nike as “The Big Shoe Company,” hyper-linked to some list that indiscriminately shows ( based on earnings ) who is currently the “Big One.”
And, one could logically argue that since a user has experienced content, the result of that experience is now their ( the user’s ) intellectual property. One could easily establish that the end result of this experience is art. Or an art-form. Users are reiterating their experiences, for good or bad, with or without financial gain.
I know it sounds estranged, but it’s plausible. And that is exactly what users are doing.
Just a thought.
Comment by Marc — March 29, 2007 @ 4:06 pm