Media Corporations are just plain evil

I give you Viacom (via Boing Boing), who tried to sue Google (which owns Youtube) for $1bn+ for copyright infringement. Basically, they wanted Youtube to have lawyers check every single video uploaded before it went live, in case there was anything on there belonging to Viacom.

Viacom's unique interpretation of this statute held that online service providers should review all material before it went live. If they're right, you can kiss every message-board, Twitter-feed, photo-hosting service, and blogging platform goodbye -- even if it was worth someone's time to pay a lawyer $500/hour to look at Twitter and approve tweets before they went live, there just aren't enough lawyers in the universe to scratch the surface of these surfaces. 

YouTube alone gets over 29 hours' worth of video per minute.

Now, it's a bit naughty to put other people's work on Youtube, but they've already been paid, and nobody's making money from uploading their favourite Blackadder joke or pictures of their cats watching snooker.

Viacom itself was behaving rather oddly: while one set of Viacom employees was hunting down Viacom material posted on Youtube, another set of Viacom employees was being paid to upload Viacom material. Then a third set of Viacom employees would send threatening letters to Google about Viacom material posted by the other Viacom employees.

 Filings in the case reveal that Viacom paid dozens of marketing companies to clandestinely upload its videos to YouTube (sometimes "roughing them up" to make them look like pirate-chic leaks). Viacom uploaded so much of its content to YouTube that it actually lost track of which videos were "really" pirated, and which ones it had put there, and sent legal threats to Google over videos it had placed itself.

Youtube seemed to be very keen to act lawfully - sent a list of 100,000 infringing videos, they removed the material within a day. That's good going.

Meanwhile, Viacom's management team were getting rather arrogantly ahead of themselves:

Other filings reveal profanity-laced email exchanges between different Viacom execs debating who will get to run YouTube when Viacom destroys it with lawsuits, and execs who express their desire to sue YouTube because they can't afford to buy the company and can't replicate its success on their own.

The judge has told Viacom to piss off. Their new media reaction:

Viacom has vowed to appeal.