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Viacom alternating between cool and uncool

When Viacom severed relations from Tom Cruise last year, many of us thought ‘cool’- at least there is someone oout there in movieland who doesn’t care about stars, their egos and eccentricities. However, few will find any ‘coolness’ about Viacom’s decision to sue Google over copyright infringements on Youtube.

If you go over Viacoms’s reasons for suing Google and you will see the same music played to not much success by the music companies.

A brief takeout:

1. If Google decides to seriously fight Viacom’s Lawsuit, the two companies may be locked in courtroom battle for quite some time. In that time much can happen: Youtube may have a better monitoring system in place. Youtube is stil a new service – younger than Sumner Redstone, cynics might say. By that time Google will have partnerships with big media in place. The new office New York is a long-term strategic investment for Google.

2. Moreover, the copyright law is a decade old.

3. Jeff Jarvis makes two great observations:

Viacom complains about YouTube but, in truth, they’re complaining about their own viewers. They whine about theft but, in fact, they’re whining about recommendation, about their audience finding them more audience. Viacom is trying, singlehandedly, to turn the TV industry into the music industry. They are trying to spread stupid.

More on Viacom’s ‘stupidity’

…CBSNews.com, (says) that when an infringing clip goes up on YouTube, they take it down and then replace it with a noninfringing, official copy, which has the added benefit of enabling the conversation to cluster around one rather than many copies of the same event. That’s smart. I guess when Viacom and CBS split up, CBS got the IQ.

Detailed roundup coverage of Google-YouTube buyout:
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Labels: Media

posted by Pramit Singh @ 3:38 PM