If you keep any eye on the news, you would know that Viacom slapped a $1 billion lawsuit on Google, specifically targetting YouTube, for unauthorized use of copyrighted entertainment.
Here’s is a core piece of Viacom’s statement:
‘’YouTube is a significant, for-profit organization that has 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. Their business model, which is based on building traffic and selling advertising off of unlicensed content, is clearly illegal and is in obvious conflict with copyright laws. In fact, YouTube’s strategy has been to avoid taking proactive steps to curtail the infringement on its site, thus generating significant traffic and revenues for itself while shifting the entire burden – and high cost – of monitoring YouTube onto the victims of its infringement.’’
Some think it’s just a scare tactic and that nothing will come of the lawsuit - only time will tell, and at this rate - it looks like a long time! Google needs to find a method of prevening copyrighted material from being loaded to YouTube. They have begun to remove some of this material at the request of Viacom, but Viacom claims it is not fast enough or sufficient enough for their likings - hence, the lawsuit. Even once they remove the material, there’s no sure-fire way to keep users from uploading the same content again.
Where there is a will there is a way…..
Google can come up with something!