Clear guidelines please
The alleged motivation behind all this clandestine uploading was to promote the content in question. A further allegation - ridiculous if it's true - is that some of the clips Viacom is suing YouTube over were uploaded by Viacom itself!
Ultimately, Levine says it's impossible for sites like YouTube to police every bit of content uploaded and they would cease to be if forced to do so. This is a similar line of reasoning to Google's response to an Italian court's decision to allow individual Google employees to be prosecuted for a video posted to Google Video of a person being victimised.
Funnily enough, Viacom doesn't agree. It has published a ton of legal documentation and issued a statement apparently in response to Levine's blog post. "YouTube was intentionally built on infringement and there are countless internal YouTube communications demonstrating that YouTube's founders and its employees intended to profit from that infringement," it opens.
It argues that Google had the technology to stop the copyright infringement on YouTube, but chose not to use it. Therefore the intention to infringe was still there, which nullifies the protection Google thinks it's entitled to as a service provider.
"These facts are undisputed," concludes the statement. "The statements by Google regarding Viacom activities are merely red herrings and have no relevance on the legal facts of this case."
More important than any money Viacom ends-up getting out of Google is the precedent potentially set here. With social media use growing faster than ever, people are going to continue to upload content onto the web. There needs to be clear guidelines for hosting sites about what's legal and what isn't.
