Viacom sues Google for $1 Billion

[Grim]

Does Viacom have a lawsuit here?

Clicky

[Canadian*Sniper]

Ya heard about that yesterday. I knew google was going to get sued sooner or later.

[Baker]

Why don't they sue Google for $500 trillion dollars of damages instead of $1 billion?

Either of those numbers are equally make-believe damages, because we all know Viacom hasn't suffered a billion dollars of harm because people upload a clip with Cartman in it.

Of all things that actually protect Google, the DMCA actually shields Google from liability providing that they promptly remove offending material upon request.

There is nothing to this lawsuit, but it will be fun to watch copyright protection erode in outcome. It always take high profile lawsuits to clarify and/or to get the court to do meaningful ruling on the limits of things like copyright law.

Why not sue Google for caching web pages -- OMG! You stored a copy of my copyrighted material. Copyright laws grant way too many protections, this is no different than companies suing individuals for personal fan pages in 1990's.

[scar3crow]

Did you know that in the language the cultists in Blood speak, Viacom actually translates to "Dirty money grubbing ****s who are willing to ruin things for everyone else so as to continue giving themselves head just for the joy of swallowing"? Its based off of the root word NewellGabian meaning "To Valve".

Seriously, this whole trend of taking down little clips and such just pisses me off - if an entire episode is up, yeah okay... But if someone is willing to piece together from various clips an entire episode of Family Guy, more than likely they wont mind downloading it from a torrent either.

Two weeks ago I was looking at Iced Earth's myspace page, since it had videos up for their music videos, most of which I have not seen - but the youtube links wouldnt play, because the song had been removed by the copyright holder. Some company owned some company which owned some company which owned the record label Iced Earth is on, and as a consequence, Jon Schaeffer cant let people stream in their browser a music video hes in, of a song he composed.

I know its technically legal, but that doesnt mean it isnt dumb as shit.

[Baker]

Earlier in the history of the internet, copyright holders would sue kids with Spiderman or Matrix fan pages and so on for "illegally" using copyrighted material.

Google isn't putting the "infringing" stuff on YouTube themselves and you can't watch everything and users have the license agreement.

Google will win this in some shape or form because they can afford "think tank" type of legal counsel. Besides, none of the modern things like video services, book searches or search engines are possible without some sort of trivial infringement.

The defectiveness of current copyright law is why a lot of trivially illegal downloads (obsolete software, abandonware, old movies) have to be done with BitTorrent and other systems that were designed specifically to be accountable by no one.

[Canadian*Sniper]

Let's form up, brainstorm in this thread, then sue google! We'll make so much money $v$

[spooker]

i somehow doubt this is the first time google's been sued. they've been stepping on many prominent toes for a long time now, and pushing the legal envelope in many new directions, as enabled by new technologies. the fact that there's a lawsuit is not a catastrophe, just a sign of the proper functioning of our legal system.

About the numbers, there are good legal theories that would justify the awarding to Viacom of more than it lost through Google's actions. The main one is that the probability of enforcement is less than 1, and so for every successful case (meaning a conviction where a conviction is due) there are other unsuccessful cases (meaning a failure to get a conviction where a conviction is due). So, to get adequate deterrence, when there is a successful case you have to award more than the amount of the damages from that specific case.

-spook the quake lawyer

[Mindf!3ldzX]

spook, after your 5th "10 dollar word" , I said FUCK YOU SPOOK,YOU WANNA CURSE ME,FUCK YOU!!.... and then I realized,that your just politely surfing www.m-w.com and trying to serenade me with your big words.

I love you

[spooker]

for all my posts, first i write what i mean, then i plug it into a translator that adds bombast, then i post the result
i love you

[Grim]

Sounds to me that Viacom is trying to pick fly dung out of black pepper with boxing gloves on.

I don't know about you, but I've seen many times where Google has removed something for one reason or another.

Viacom only asked for a "billion" dollars just to geet their attention. IMO, they have already lost.