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YouTube Fires Back At Viacom

As we say in the legal profession, 'issue has been joined' in Viacom v. YouTube. In its answer to Viacom's complaint (PDF), filed Friday, YouTube says Viacom's lawsuit is intended to 'challenge... the protections of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act ("DMCA") that Congress enacted a decade ago to encourage the development of services like YouTube.' It goes on to say that the suit 'threatens the way hundreds of millions of people legitimately exchange information, news, entertainment, and political and artistic expression.'

Viacom's Hostility to Web Users Continues

Since launching its new Web site for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, the Comedy Central network, whose parent company is Viacom, has as yet not offered an RSS feed for clips of the popular show (for now, you can use this one). As it releases new shows, such as Lewis Black's Root of All Evil and Lil Bush, it does so without providing an RSS feed for clips, as it used to here for earlier shows.

Google to Viacom - The Law is Clear, and On Our Side

"Google responded to the opinion piece in the Washington Post by a Viacom Lawyer with a letter to the editor titled 'An End Run on Copyright Law.' Their strong wording sends a very concrete message: 'Viacom is attempting to rewrite established copyright law through a baseless lawsuit. In February, after negotiations broke down, Viacom requested that YouTube take down more than 100,000 videos. We did so immediately, working through a weekend.

EFF sues Viacom over YouTube takedown of Colbert parody

Oh Viacom, you should read those DMCA lists of clips before you order them taken down: The video, called "Stop the Falsiness," was created by MoveOn and Brave New Films as a tongue-in-cheek commentary on Colbert's portrayal of the right-wing media and parodying MoveOn's own reputation for earnest political activism.

Daily Show on Viacom sues YouTube

Daily Show tells kids to make their own Daily Show.

Former Viacom boss's special needs

Former Viacom chief Thomas Freston, who walked out with $85 million when he was sacked last year, is suing the New York board of education for not educating his son in public school.

iFilm Infringement Could Blunt Viacom's YouTube Argument

"Infringing videos on iFilm could undermine Viacom's case against YouTube. Although it's arguably not a nest of infringement like YouTube, iFilm appears to host more than a handful of videos for which its corporate parent Viacom does not own the copyright. More importantly, Viacom isn't engaging in the kind of proactive infringement identification practices it expects of YouTube, which may cause problems for them in court.

Viacom’s Full-Court Press for Online Ads

Video advertising, while less than 5 percent of online spending, is the fastest-growing advertising category online, generating $410 million last year, an increase of 82 percent from 2005, according to eMarketer, an online advertising research firm.

Nation & World | Viacom sues YouTube for copyright infringement | Seattle Times Newspaper

Conflict first reported here by NewsCloud - expands to courts: MTV owner Viacom Inc. sued the popular video-sharing site YouTube and its corporate parent, Google Inc., today, seeking more than $1 billion in damages on claims of widespread copyright infringement.

Viacom terrorizes YouTube with bull**** DMCA notices

And Google can take steps now to reduce that load: sue the living **** out of Viacom. We've got precedent -- the Diebold debacle -- for the idea that abusing the DMCA takedown process is illegal. Courts have been willing to punish this kind of excess by awarding fees and damages.

Viacom demands YouTube remove videos

Viacom Inc. on Friday demanded that Google Inc.'s online video service YouTube remove more than 100,000 video clips after they failed to reach a distribution agreement.

YouTube, Comedy Central Tussle More About Ad Inventory Than Copyright

While the battle currently centers on Comedy Central clips, the war is reportedly more about pre-roll ads than copyright concerns. ... Unlike Comedy Central's broadband offering Motherload (or similar offerings from Viacom-owned MTV and VH1), clips on YouTube don't include pre-roll ads, which is vexing to Viacom. It sees a large potential sales opportunity going to waste, and is using the DMCA requests as leverage in an attempt to get YouTube to allow both pre-roll ads on their content.

NewsCloud Publishes Reporting on YouTube's Comedy Central Takedowns

Tonight, NewsCloud publicly released its reporting engine on YouTube's ongoing takedowns of Comedy Central material with its Summary Reports and Video Search. Our video search can only be used to find clips by keyword to determine whether the videos are still available or not. While Viacom has released public statements saying that they were targeting YouTube with requests to take down whole episodes, I found the takedowns to be fairly indiscriminate. For example, 63% of Daily Show clips (and 58% of all shows) taken down were less than 5 minutes in length. We also wanted to get a sense of the number of page views just our subset of video clips had generated for YouTube over time - this also represents potential lost revenue for Viacom. Just the subset of broken clips with view count information left in the Google cache represents 14,867,004 viewings. While the live videos at YouTube represent 23,322,598 viewings. Or, 38,189,602 combined.

Viacom's Copyrighted Content Yanked Off YouTube

"This instantly puts a clear frame on what exactly did Google buy and was it worth $1.6 billion?" Mr. Reifman said, later adding, "Someone at Viacom has a sense of humor, saying you guys are crazy to pay $1.6 billion and we'll show you how crazy."