Meta: Pardon my French, but "SCREW YOU", Viacom!

[erestor]

Viacom Gets YouTube User Data

Google Must Divulge YouTube Log

Judge Protects YouTube's Source Code, Throws Users To The Wolves

Yes, yes, I know, "meh, what do I care as long as I can still watch videos" - but thanks to Judge Louis L. Stanton in New York (that will become important later on), Viacom has now the means to get directly on the chests of

Comments

[anjak_j]

Like yourself, I understand the fight against privacy, but the way the entertainment industry is addressing it is to my mind like closing the stable door after the horse has bolted. When the internet started to be more common-place in homes and the likes of Napster came along, the music industry was warned about the consequences - and chose to bury its head in the sand. The continual answer of the RIAA is to sue people who download illegally. And instead of learning anything from how badly this - and DRM - has failed, the MPAA and companies like Viacom are heading in exactly the same direction.

These companies really need to address the base reasons why people download illegally in the first place. The argument about things being free which they use is frankly fallacious in the extreme - my downloading has more to do with the fact I live in the global community now, through the internet, and I don't want to wait however many weeks or months for the area I live in to catch up with the originating country of a show. I'm plenty happy to pay for online content - I already have a yearly subscription to MLB.tv to watch baseball. There are so many ways in which TV companies could provide content online without users having to pay for every episode through nefarious services like iTunes. Hell, I'd be happy to download legal downloads with advertising - I think it's funny that American TV is dripping in advertising and yet no-one has ever thought of offering legal downloads with adverts you can't fast-forward though.

As to Viacom v's YouTube - what are they really hoping to achieve in getting this information? Are they going to sue the whole of the internet or something, because pretty much everyone who uses the net has probably watched something of theirs on YT...

[erestor]

Fully agree with you on the RIAA - it's not working, that's obvious. All it does is taking up valuable resources from the legal systems that could really be used differently. The media giants will have to sit down sooner or later and work out a concept that brings their target - making money - into agreement with the wishes of the customers. Sueing them (or youtube) is not the way.

As I mentioned above, shows like "Swingtown" would rake in far more money if the paid download was available *worldwide* rather than just countrywide. People want to see "their" shows now, not with two years delay, cut, butchered and dubbed. Fans of Doctor Who? in Germany or Sweden or wherever will of course turn to illegal ways to watch their favourite show if there's no other way.

The companies ignore how fans (who are in the end the ones who buy merchandise, DVDs etc.) work. They want to discuss a show right after the airing, not one year later. They want to be creative with the fannish material; fanvids, fanfic etc. are promotion. There are so many shows I've never heard of if it hadn't been for my f-list mentioning them. Viacom et al should use this dynamic in their advantage rather than try to kill it off.

With youtube's data, Viacom wants to prove that people basically visit youtube to watch pirated material rather than original content. Ignoring completely WHY there's pirated material there in the first place, that not everything they consider to be pirated really is and that millions and millions of users have their data exposed who never even LOOKED at a Viacom video. "Let's shoot all, the guilty will be among them." Nice principle.