Viacom Sues Google for a Billion Dollars
March 13, 2007 by Jayvee Fernandez
Filed under Computers
Not satisfied with pulling their clips off YouTube (Twice. Indiscriminately.), Viacom is now suing YouTube owner Google for one billion dollars. That’s over half the price Google bought YouTube for, at 1.65 billion dollars.
Of course, we all know this flamboyant ten-figure gesture is just another impatiently greedy negotiating tactic for Viacom to pull in an early unfair share of the coming YouTube revenue split. Yes, they think they’re better than us regular YouTube uploaders. What everyone but Viacom knows, is that YouTubers now hate Viacom.
Best bit in the suit: “a large part of YouTube’s value is directly attributable to the availability of Plaintiffs’ copyrighted works on YouTube’s website.” What a deluded claim! Even Viacom itself claims only 100,000 clips on YouTube, whereas YouTubers upload almost two million new clips per month. Sure, Jon Stewart was a YouTube star for a while, but there are many others — many, many others.
That’s the key to social media’s resilience: it does not rely on a constellation of a few stars. As Steve Rubel likes to say, media is now a galaxy of stars and planets, each with its own center of gravity. In the media galaxy, Viacom is a dying star becoming nothing but a destructive black hole.
(Via Mia Dand.)
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28 Responses to “Viacom Sues Google for a Billion Dollars”Trackbacks
Check out what others are saying about this post...[...] Viacom is suing Google. What a bunch of losers. [...]
[...] Even before receiving a copy of Viacom’s $1 billion lawsuit, Google has released a response. [...]
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[...] Michael Crook. What surprises me is that he’d actually get this far. Seems YouTube’s recent legal hassles really got them [...]
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[...] not only chooses to fight Viacom’s $1 billion dollar lawsuit over YouTube. They demand a fight. “By seeking to make carriers and hosting providers liable for Internet [...]
[...] threaten my people with slavery and death. Oh, Chad’s chosen his words carefully, Viacom. Perhaps you [...]
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[…] a move that will spare them a lot more stupid lawsuits, YouTube announced yesterday that they will test a new video fingerprinting technology next month. […]
[...] off YouTube. Those Googlers work fast. Phillip Beck, one of the lawyers representing Google in Viacom’s stupid billion-dollar lawsuit against the video-sharing site, says the system could be operational as early as September. [...]
[...] In the geek’s guide to good and evil, Viacom is evil, but Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are good. Both Stewart and Colbert were also YouTube stars before Viacom took their clips down. Colbert in particular has been known to support viral video mashups. That’s probably why YouTube owner Google wants to question the two Viacom-employed comedians in Viacom’s billion-dollar suit against Google. [...]
[...] orphaned MTV’s music store in favor of the lame-o Zune. MTV is owned by the idiots at Viacom. MTV doesn’t even play much music anymore. That’s why when I heard that MTV [...]
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[...] these guys are also suing YouTube for — say it in a Dr. Evil voice, everyone — one BILLION dollars! I don’t know what business strategy involves embodying everything your customers [...]
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