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Monthly Archives: September 2010

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Until this past summer, the idea that YouTube might turn a substantial profit at long last may have been as improbable as Jon Stewart friending Glenn Beck on Facebook. But a federal judge’s recent ruling in YouTube’s favor in the 3-year-long copyright dispute with Viacom, the owner of such profitable brands as Paramount, Nickelodeon and Comedy Central, is a major victory in what some are calling a landmark copyright case.The much-discussed suit revolved around Viacom’s allegations that YouTube only became the Internet’s most viewed video site by posting copyright-protected clips “stolen” from its shows. But in evoking a law that shields Internet services from claims of copyright infringement as long as the illegal content is removed,the Court noted that YouTube had removed about 100,000 videos the day after Viacom sent a mass takedown notice. If the Court in this case had agreed with Viacom, and ordered Google to pay the more than $ 1 billion in business damages the media conglomerate was seeking, the impact on YouTube’s future profitability could have been considerable.For a media conglomerate such as Viacom, however, copyright infringement on a site that might attract well over a billion visitors a day, could translate into lost revenue from DVD sales and rentals, worldwide TV syndication, and paid online distribution of their content. When copyrighted content is readily available for free on YouTube, for example, the Court may take into account what profits, if any, would have been generated by Viacom if not for the alleged copyright infringement. But is this a case of lost profits or lost business for a media conglomerate–or perhaps both?In […]