Comfortable Disappearance

You may have heard that Viacom has filed a suit against Google for $1,000,000,000 ($1b). While watching coverage of this story today on CNN, it’s pretty clear why traditional media is in trouble.

CNN’s coverage of this piece, until later today, did not mention the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The DMCA is probably the most essential piece of legislation to a story such as this, as it stipulates that an application service provider is not held liable for copyright infringement committed by users of its service, as long as it makes an effort to remove protected content when notified of it.

Adversely, CNN’s jimledbetter alleges that Viacom has a chance due to the fact that Google makes money off the infringing content. The suit states that

YouTube has harnessed technology to willfully infringe copyrights on a huge scale.

However, what jimledbetter does not take into account, but is mentioned in the previous piece is the fact that other media firms and Viacom have entered into agreements with Google to receive portions of the advertising revenues from their clips.

It seems to me that since Viacom had attempted to negotiate a settlement with Google and given Google’s protections under the DMCA that Viacom would not prevail in court. The intellectual property law junkie in me wants to see this head to court, but the realist (i.e. one who doesn’t believe in the technological intelligence of judges) in me is afraid for what this could mean for similar lawsuits in the future.