Youtube we barely knew you
YouTube has been asked by Viacomm to remove over 100,000 videos that pertain to copyrighted material owned by the media company.
Viacomm owns such properties as Comedy Central and by extension The Daily Show, The Colbert Report and South Park.
YouTube is complying. It's stated policy is that while it will do no policing of posted material, it will remove videos after received a verified copyright complaint.
Let's look at this cynically...Why would Viacomm want to stop millions of people from watching their television shows and increasing the propertys' popularity? They wouldn't, of course. They are negotiating. Like the revival of Napster as a whorish shadow of what it once was--the Costco of pirated music--the media companies are mad because they're not in control of their property, not because people are watching it. They have not yet come around to the idea that popularity of a video, detached from its original distribution source is potentially okay. I say potentially, because they will have to reinvent their business model since it's too easy to strip ads out of Internet downloadable videos.
Back to Viacomm. One of the biggest video downloads on most video sites are South Park reruns. Presumably they're on the Youtube chopping block, too. Yet, the show owes its existence to Internet distribution. Parker and Stone's careermaking video, the Spirit of Christmas, about Jesus fighting Santa Claus was not only hilarious but so widely distributed around the Net that I made special accomodations for it as a shared file at Network Solutions where I worked at that time, so people wouldn't squirrel away copies of the huge file in their personal area. I say "huge", when of course it was nothing in today's terms.
Viacomm and the other media dinosaurs will come to grips with the new world of digital media distribution, in which you lose the battle (control) and win the war (popularity).
But what about YouTube? My advice is that if they are not to become inconsequential by being exsanguinated by sharp-toothed intellectual property lawyers, they will have to make a stand. I propose something radical--move your servers to some other country and thumb your nose at the Man. For an example, check out www.peekvid.com.
Posted on February 05, 2007
