What Google, Viacom and Prince tell us about the Web in 2010

 

The Hollywood Reporter said it best:   "The Google geeks have beaten Hollywood chic."

The article went on to describe the clear message in federal judge Stanton's ruling in favor of Google, which had been sued for $1B in damages by Viacom over perceived copyright infringement on its YouTube subsidiary: 

When user-generated video sites implement reasonable takedown procedures, they are shielded from infringement lawsuits based on the copyrighted content that users upload.

'If a service provider knows of specific instances of infringement, the provider must promptly remove the infringing material,' Stanton wrote in the opinion. 'If not, the burden is on the owner to identify the infringement.'

Wired's coverage of the decision views this as "a boon for internet freedom, especially as it applies to search engines, video-hosting companies, picture-hosting services like Flickr, social-networking sites like Facebook and micro-blogging services such as Twitter. But it will make it all the more difficult for rights holders to protect their works."

Propagation of the hive mind

The decision certainly reflects how rapidly the way business is conducted has changed since the suit was filed in 2007.  In that respect, it feels like a good thing for continued freedom of creating and sharing content online.  But I also can understand Viacom's statements (referring to internal emails) that YouTube knowingly used copyrighted material to build their following and their business value and only policed this when their hands were slapped.  Clearly that will be the basis of Viacom's planned appeal, as the New York Times reported:

'Copyright protection is essential to the survival of creative industry,' Michael Fricklas, Viacom’s general counsel, wrote in a blog post. Mr. Fricklas said that before YouTube put in place a filtering mechanism to more easily detect copyright infringement, the company had built itself on pirated material and sold itself to Google for $1.65 billion.

'YouTube and Google stole hundreds of thousands of video clips from artists and content creators, including Viacom, building a substantial business that was sold for billions of dollars,' Mr. Fricklas said. Legal experts said that the ruling blessed YouTube’s practices for dealing with copyrighted material, as well as those of many other sites that handle user-generated content in a similar fashion.

One of my younger colleagues, Zack Daschofsky, pointed out the decision favoring Google to me, noting in an e-mail: 

This ruling is less about Google specifically and more about the propagation of the hive mind that marks the internet, and, to a lesser extent, my generation.  YouTube is simply one of the first incarnations of the everyday person being able to post their own ideas, parodies and, yes, even copyrighted material.  The question for artists now is not 'who can we sue to make money,' (like the music industry had done over and over again in recent years), but how will the market adapt to incorporate this new mentality.  

We have to face it: people will be illegally downloading movies and music from now on.  Many artists like OK GO and Radiohead have adapted by realizing the way to make money off of performances, merchandising, etc.  Radiohead recently gained notoriety by giving away their music on the internet and OK GO releases music videos on YouTube.  So as someone who has grown up with this mentality, Viacom represents the old business-model that wants to be belligerent instead of adapting to new services such as Hulu.  This ruling is not saying that stealing copyrighted material is morally acceptable, as much as a wake-up call that this is the new means of proliferation.

And judging by the reaction to Prince's declaration that the "Internet is over", this debate will not end anytime soon.  I can see both sides of the coin on this one, although watching my own teens and young adults participating in the inevitable "collective hive mind" Zack describes is leaning me toward Google on this one.   What do you think?