Viacom Lawsuit Against YouTube Still Useless

by on July 21, 2008 · 15 comments

Last week CNN Money reported on the latest development in the $1 billion lawsuit that media giant Viacom has filed against Google noting that:

Viacom has agreed to let Google strip identifying information from YouTube viewers’ data before complying with a judge’s order to hand over the records as part of a copyright infringement lawsuit.

This is a small victory for YouTube as it was able to at least provide some assurance to its user base that their viewing history would be protected. But this smaller triumph doesn’t change the larger picture: This lawsuit is pointless.

How can I make such an assertion? Anecdotal evidence!

Today I was discussing Joe Cocker—the blues singer made famous by his rearrangements of popular songs like “Help from my Friends” by the Beatles—with a co-worker. He mentioned that John Belushi used to parody cocker’s spastic dancing style on Saturday Night Live. My reaction to this was to immediately try to find a video of it on YouTube.

I had little luck finding anything on YouTube. A search for “john belushi joe cocker saturday night live” produced some Belushi material, but not the Cocker impression. I’m sure that nearly anything with the phrase “saturday night live” in the tag has been taken down by NBC.

I then tried “john belushi joe cocker” and got one video of Belushi doing a spot-on Cocker parody. Still it wasn’t an SNL video. I needed a bigger engine.

Enter Google, YouTube’s parent company since November of 2006. Throw the search terms “john belushi joe cocker saturday night live” into Google and you get a performance from SNL as the 2nd result.

As I said in a previous post that was picked up by the All Things D blog, booting content off of YouTube doesn’t delete the content from the Internet at large. Instead, it moves that content to smaller website and blogs, overseas servers, or other large video sites.

The Belushi-as-Cocker clips show this to be true. Belushi’s SNL performances haven’t been obliterated by take-down notices, they’ve just been shuffled around the web. Now they’re harder to find for folks like me and also harder for NBC to find so they can continue to post take-downs.

Business has to learn to adapt to the web and its ability to infinitely copy material and distribute around the world—and across legal jurisdictions—in an instant.

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Cord Blomquist / Cord Blomquist spends most of his time pining for the singularity. To pass the time while waiting for this convergence, he serves as the New Media Manager at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Before landing this sweet gig, Cord hocked policy writing for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, toiled in the halls of Congress, and even worked in a crouton factory. In college, Cord spent his hours studying political philosophy and artificial intelligence, resulting in an unhealthy obsession with Lt. Commander Data. All of these activities will, of course, be viewed as laughable when he is ported from this crude meatspace into the nanobot cloud.

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