Google was slammed today by a demand from Viacom to remove over 100,000 MTV, Daily Show, SouthPark BET and other copyrighted materials. This comes after months of failed negotiations between the two companies to find a way for Google to compensate Viacom for this content. According to Viacom, the clips in question have been viewed over 1 billion times.
In a prepared statement emailed to us, Viacom says:
After months of ongoing discussions with YouTube and Google, it has become clear that YouTube is unwilling to come to a fair market agreement that would make Viacom content available to YouTube users. Filtering tools promised repeatedly by YouTube and Google have not been put in place, and they continue to host and stream vast amounts of unauthorized video. YouTube and Google retain all of the revenue generated from this practice, without extending fair compensation to the people who have expended all of the effort and cost to create it. The recent addition of YouTube-served content to Google Video Search simply compounds this issue.
Virtually every other distributor has acknowledged the fair value of entertainment content and has taken deliberate steps to concluding agreements with content providers.
Despite rumors that Google has been very close to announcing deals, to date no major network has agreed to a long term agreement to allow their content to appear on YouTube. A broad deal with CBS which was reportedly very close to being finalized, was slated to be announced at CES. That announcement never came, and insiders are questioning whether Google is simply stalling for time as they try to figure out exactly how they are willing to proceed. There are rumors that Google pulled multiple offers to Viacom, leading executives there to throw up their hands in frustration. Their statement today, along with the takedown demand, is a very tangible result of that frustration.
When Google acquired YouTube, a lot of people speculated that the popular video sharing site could suffer the same fate as Napster, with copyright holders suing it out of existence. Those speculations were silenced when Google engaged in direct negotiations with copyright holders, offering rich licensing fees and revenue sharing for content. Now, with Google yet to show a single major deal, those speculations are sure to resurface, louder than ever. The future of IPTV is still very much in play.
Can’t say I blame them… Would you take steps if a competitor was stealing your content, and then monetizing on it? Of course you would (well, at least I would).
People will always infringe copyrights, so I doubt this will matter in the long run.
That revenue sharing that YouTube was talking about might be harder to implement then they think.
If YouTube gets as big as people want it to, it will definitely matter when companies like MTV, VH1, etc.. can’t produce anymore material because they can’t get compensation for it.
In that case, it’s even worse in the long run… YouTube isn’t some small file-sharing site where a few thousand people trade videos.
Google was looking unstoppable until this Youtube thing. If they miss (or just barely make) revenue expectations next quarter because of a multimillion (-billion?) dollar payoff to Big Media, that stock is going to sink like lead.
Could Google be harming YouTube?
http://blogs.zd...om/social/?p=10
I still say Google is the 800lb. gorilla here. This is sabre rattling by Viacom and in the long run Google can, and will, setup distribution deals with these content producers. In a week those 100,000 links will be back up and we’ll be right back at the start again ready for more negotiation.
Do I hear Mark Cuban giggling to himself?!?
Overall, I think this is a negotiation tactic by Viacom, not unexpected. There has been discussions in reputable media sources like NYT regarding GooTube’s naivete in getting major content deals done. Hollywood/Major networks aren’t afriad to play hardball (even with Google) and they do have copyright law on their side.
The press release is interesting because of explicit reference to YouTube not putting copyright monitoring in place that they promised last year. Clearly, there’s no way to automate this process – everyone has been over simplifying the technology required to do computer-based recognition of video.
However, I think this will be ultimately smoothed over with some Google $$$’s. This is just a massive take down notice and not a lawsuit.
However, if Viacom “wins” here, it’ll just egg on other content owners to do the same.
Is anyone else recieving no data from google analytics today?!
Youtube = Napster
Japan already wants their content out. Viacom wants their content out. You start searching and start taking out CBS, Fox, Disney, and other media properties and all you have left are shitty videos. Very few of those ever bubble up.
Except Youtube was able to parlay themselves into an exit.
I will say it once more. Make sure you have a business model in place and the majority of your foreseen liabilities covered before you start build your service. You don’t ever want to be left saying “How will i monetize this?”
This sounds terrible for GooTube. I’m sure those Viacom clips contributed to a big chunk of YouTube’s popularity. In fact, I used youtube mostly when I wanted to watch a south park, daily show, colbert or mtv music video. Now since that’s gone, my use of the site will go down dramatically. Not sure how many others out there our like me.
These copyright holders are complete morons. The Daily Show and Colbert had more done for their brands by digg and youtube than any marketing campaign they’ve ever done. Their ratings are still crap, but not as crap as they were before.
A rough rule of thumb is that websites earn anywhere between $1 to $5 ad revenue for every 1,000 hits, so 1 billion hits of these Viacom videos generate, at most, $5 million revenue. Out of the $5 million, Viacom cannot claim every penny of it, because these videos are able to generate 1 billion hits only on YouTube, not on other less popular video sites. In fairness, Viacom will have to split the income with YouTube, so, we are talking about $2.5 million that YouTube owes Viacom so far.
The question is: is it wise for Viacom, a monster business conglomerate, to throw this legal temper tantrum over a couple of million dollars and risk 1) losing the promotional benefits these videos generate for being on YouTube and 2) offending the fans who uploaded these videos?
For instance, the guy who uploaded, say, a Stephen Colbert clip to YouTube did not do it because he hated Stephen Colbert. He bothered to tape the show off the air, convert it into an uploadable file, and then upload it to YouTube. In other words, these are “fan activities”.
These “fan activities” are similar to what a “Star Wars” fan does when he takes the time to make a Darth Vader costume and pays to travel to a “Star Wars” convention. George Lucas, in his profound wisdom, did not tell his lawyers to send “cease and desist” orders to the clubs and conventions organized by “Star Wars” fans, and because that, “Star Wars” is wildly successfully and Mr. Lucas is richer than your uncle.
Viacom execs, learn a lesson from George Lucas.
That’s a serious blow for Gootube.
BTW, I also don’t get any data from Google Analytics in the past 24 hours or so.
YouTube was hot and user generated. Google made it corporate. I don’t blame them for wanting their content off of YouTube, even though it’s a double edged sword. If they start streaming their own clips, then people will just go there. People go where the content is. If YouTube loses content, they’ll lose the people as well.
I would imagine Google revenue is rising pretty rapibly, and Viacom’s is probably either stable or dropping…
Viacom
Revenue $9.609 Billion USD (2005)
Net income $1.256 Billion USD (2005)
Google
Revenue $7.14 Billion USD (2006)
Net income $1.47 Billion USD (2005)
My point is that Google is in the position of power here, they have money, lawyers and YouTube.com. Viacom is only pissed because whatever half-assed video site they’ve launched or will be launching is going to get it’s ass kicked if these video stay online at YouTube.
Viacom will break first and Google’s lawyers will laugh all the way to the bank. And whatever money Google pays to Viacom will be minimal.
And one more thing, comparing Google to Napster is ridiculous, I don’t even think I need to explain the differences (well maybe to Arrington)
Viacom should brand all their content and be done with it.
Thats alot of marketing for them with a url link straight to their.
Viacom should brand all their content and be done with it.
Thats alot of marketing for them with a url link straight to their site.
i think its a tough blog for google either way!
I just find it so incredibly stupid that they can “ride the wave of publicity” before YouTube was acquired. However, once they have a financial backer, best take action. It seems to me that any legal action not put forth from the beginning should be thrown out.
In a sense they condone the misuse of copyrights yet they turn around and sue them for misuse once they have cash. Seems like a contradictory message and statement. To me, that would be enough to throw it out.
This is very difficult for YouTube to do in a comprehensive way. I was VP of product development at Napster when the RIAA and Federal judge asked us to filter out all copyrighted music. It was difficult with music…it will be nearly impossible for video.
The problem is completeness. You can put together hashing algorithms and “finger printing” techniques to find the obvious stuff…maybe 80% of the copyrighted content. The remaining 20% is nearly impossible to identify with precision and completeness. It will require lots of human review to get it done.
Then the users will get very clever in disguising the clips they upload with different names, tags, sample rates, lengths, fake lead ins, etc.
The judge in the Napster case demanded 100% compliance, not 90% or 95%…100%. There was no way to effectively do it so the judge just shut Napster down.
The truth is that Viacom probably couldn’t provide a 100% accurate list of their clips either.
I wrote a blog on this topic today, and anothrer on my experiences at Napster battling a similar problem with the RIAA. See http://dondodge...m_serves_y.html
I first starting using YouTube to watch things like the Daily Show.
Without high quality content YouTube will find it difficult to acquire new users and keep exisiting ones. Most people did not start using YouTube to watch home-made videos. They used it to watch South Park, The Simpsons, The Daily Show, Family Guy and lots of other content that was available for a long time.
Watching a 20 min video does not equal the value of one page impression. Watching 20 mins of content on TV probably has 5-10 mins of adverts on it. I don’t know what the value of this is but I would be it’s a lot more than one 10 second page view on a ‘normal’ website.
YouTube is not fully monetizing the ‘premium’ content just by showing ads next to the video. It could be argued that a fair price would be $2 per episode (the price iTunes is charging) then that’s $2bn dollars Viacom could claim.
I don’t doubt your knowledge re: Napster, but your writings regarding YouTube so far have been full of holes.
1) Napster had a specific court order to “comply or shut down”, whereas there is no court order, no judge’s demand, of any kind in YouTube’s situation.
2) You keep putting YouTube’s situation in a “legal” context, whereas the dispute between Google/YouTube and media companies has only reached the negotiation stage. Business negotiations do get ugly, but before court papers are filed, these are very normal routines to keep the lawyers on their payroll busy.
3) Users who intentionally tag video clips in a deceiving manner will cause those videos “un-searchable”. In other words, no one, other than the uploader and his friends, can find them anyway. In law, you cannot claim “phantom violations”. A copyright holder cannot insist that “I know my videos are on YouTube! I cannot find them, but I just know they are there somewhere!”
Mr. Dodge, you are an employee of Microsoft, a company I admire (Bill Gates is my personal hero), but your writings on YouTube’s situation might make other Microsoft’s employees cringe, particularly those who work on Microsoft’s “Soapbox”, which is Microsoft’s own video uploading/hosting site. I like Soapbox, visited there many times, and guess what, there are copyrighted materials on there as well. But if “Soapbox” team comply with DMCA and honor take-own notices, I don’t see how your citing of “95% or 100% compliance” in the case of Napster applies here.
I should be charging TechCrunch for using the word I coined. Too bad it can’t be trademarked. I’ll settle for a chocolate cookie, web 2.0 style, instead.
George Lucas received sick amounts of revenue on royalties of all licensed Star Wars content (e.g. action figures, posters, etc). On the broad spectrum of licensing opportunities I doubt that “fan activities” and conventions every game close to challenging these revenue streams, whereas content creators and offline distributors are actually feeling the pressure. Would a Star Wars convention compete with me going to the movie and buying the action figure? Nope. But would me watching Caddyshack clips on YouTube prevent me from buying the DVD? Maybe.
Re: #24 Yes, at this point YouTube is just facing a Take Down Notice, which is a legal requirement under the DMCA. But, failure to take down even one of the videos can result in huge financial penalties, or worse, loss of “Safe Harbor” provisions under the DMCA. Take Down Notices are 100% too. I am a technology guy, and I don’t like legal crap, but this is serious stuff.
Users can mke smal chngs to titles, t@gz, vidz, & kywodz and still be understood and found by humans, but not by computer algorithms. This is what makes it so hard.
Yes, I work for Microsoft now, and believe me, we need to be more cognizant of obscure laws than employees at any other company on the planet. We live the “observed life” so everything we say or do is watched and criticized.
Hey, I hope for the best at YouTube. They are trying to do the right thing. But what seems to make common sense to us normal people, has no relevance what-so-ever to the laws and how they are applied. The MPAA and RIAA have very powerful lobbyists who have convinced congress to pass some outrageous legal fines for fairly simle things. Try a $250,000 for EACH video. Mulltiply that times 100,000. It gets crazy real fast.
I have to agree with Don here (#22/#27), even besides the fact we have the same last name.
There’s really no way to fully automate the detection of copyrighted video. “Machine understanding” of video is a serious hard-core AI problem, which people do PhD’s and post-Docs on at MIT/Standford and only solve a tiny specific case of the problem. I know, I have a long background in image/DSP processing.
There’s no easy means to do this, so that means “manpower” put towards manually reviewing submitted material. That really ends up being an expensive proposition – to pay people to review submitted content. I know that too, since I worked for a Internet 1.0 user-generated video site back in ‘99-’02.
Whether or not Viacom is using this as a negotiation tactic or not, now the burden is on YouTube to comply and enter into the grey area of “what happens on resubmissions”. The content owner has now explicitly said “I don’t want such-and-such-titles on your site”, what happens on re-submission of that content really enters into legal grey areas.
Ultimately, I think Viacom and others respect and see some value in the YouTube brand. However, they are not going to give away the family jewels for nothing, especially if it helps further empower the Google juggernaut.
Viacom just don’t get Web 2.0, do they? I can’t watch shows like “The Daily Show” here unless I sign up to the ridiculously expensive monopoly Pay TV provider Foxtel ($100+ AUD a month for a full package…I don’t think so) so the only way I, and the 19 million other odd Australians who don’t have pay TV (out of 20.3m) can discover such shows is via YouTube. We do however get the International Version on the Daily Show on SBS (Free to Air TV) once a week and as a direct consequence of being able to watch the show on YouTube I now try to catch the weekly international version as well….so indirectly Viacom gets a viewer…it works and works well, and is a great way for Viacom to reach a broader audience…and yet all we get is this take down rubbish. And they wonder why people use Bittorrent?
The Economist used a nice metaphor back then in an article about the Adobe Macromedia “marriage” as they called it: When a couple fall in love, they usually start by showing their interest for each other by teasing each other; likewise, in Big Business the classic “pick-up line” is suing each other – just the usual foreplay to some sort of partnership or alliance.
YouTube = The New Napster
Ha! Every single sane person knew this was inevitable unless YouTube forfeited huge profits to the copyright holders.
There is absolutley no way they could allow Google to reap the profits of their material.
First we were told this would be resolved promptly, then just resolved, and if the rumors are correct that YouTube purposely delayed the installation of their copyright violating software, I’m guessing the Drudge link that YouTube would begin sharing revenue with USERS was the straw that broke the back.
The reporting on this company leading up to the Google purchase was very one-sided and ignored the sage advice of Mark Cuban about the copyright issues.
Bill Gates was asked last year what he thought of YouTube. He said he used it occasionally (for Harlem Globetrotter clips), but that ANY other company that used copyrighted material illegally would be shut down for using YouTube’s business model.
Did Google downplay these issues?
Duncan: what good is your viewership to them if they can’t monetize it? Google isn’t just in business to organize the world’s information – they’re in business to make money doing that. Viacom isn’t just in business to provide great entertainment – they’re in business to make money doing that. Viacom spends a lot of money producing their content and if the economics of production stop working because their content is generating less return due to piracy, then we all lose out because nobody will want to produce professional content anymore. Obviously we’re a long way from the economics failing completely (the Viacoms of the world are still making money), but it’s fairly obvious that returns are being affected in some way.
Even though it won’t happen, people should consider how selfish they’re being. Maybe Viacom is stupid to not want to leverage YouTube as a promotional tool. But the bottom line is that most sensible people would agree that if you spend time and money creating something, you should have the full rights to that creation and the ability to decide how it’s used. Viacom creates content and under the law, they have the right to determine how and where it’s used. YouTube and Google are operating a service that doesn’t give them that choice, even though they do retroactively seem to comply with most takedown notices.
As many posters have pointed out, it was fairly obvious that something like this would happen. There are way too many copyright holders out there to make it plausible that Google would be able to come to an agreement with all of them. Google and YouTube have made promises about filtering and a business model that would satisfy all parties but have failed to deliver. Perhaps it’s not as easy as they’d like to believe, regardless of how much money and resources they can throw at the problem.
By the way, it looks like Google’s “do no evil” motto has taken another hit:
http://news.com..._3-6155987.html
Maybe, just maybe, Google tried to negotiate with Viacom using the same tactics they used with North Carolina? If Google apparently shows disdain for a state and its taxpayers, would it really be surprising that they show some disdain towards a rights holder? Seems like Google wants the world and everything in it, even if it doesn’t really belong to them.
I received one of the notifications that a video of mine had been taken down. The thing is, it wasn’t breaching any copyright. It was a video I made on my camera with no music. Nothing to breach! Fools. I doubt I’ll hear back from my reply letting know their mistake.
I wonder how many other people received these incorrect notices.
@ #14 Learn a Lesson from George Lucas.
Your approach is right but I think your assumptions are wrong. In our site – about 1b pageviews generate between $40-50m */year*. Let’s take half that – say $20m for a good start number for revenue. This is per year – so you have to calculate the total value of that revenue over a serious of years – say $200m for 10 years (and that excludes growth, better monetizatin techniques etc…).
So would Viacom sue for at least $200m – maybe yes
To Michael #37,
Here is the New York Times article today that mentions the $100 million offer:
http://www.nyti...ogy/03tube.html
From the article (midway through): “Reports have been circulating in the industry that Google had offered to pay $100 million a year for the use of Viacom’s programming…”
If that is true, we’re talking about fairly normal business negotiation drama, not unlike “union vs. management” contract negotiations, say, between SAG and the movie studios.
Regarding the “Lesson from George Lucas”, I hope I don’t have to spell out Lucas’s secret to the Viacom execs: “Embrace your fans”.
How has google been “slammed”? Sure if you show me a drop in there traffic then I might agree. And why are we being lame calling YouTube GooTube. Are we going to add part of Google’s name to every company they buy out in the future?
Both YouTube and Viacom can actually learn something from this exercise of taking these 100,000 video clips off the Internet, in the sense that YouTube gets to study the impact — will there be a significant decrease of YouTube users? And Viacom has a chance to see if their shows, like “The Daily Show”, will suffer from the lack of promotional benefit.
A July/2006 report indicated that, at the time, YouTube was getting 65,000 videos uploaded to its site every 24 hours. The number must be much higher today, so 100,000 clips is about one-day worth of videos uploaded to YouTube. Source:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youtube
Some may argue that these 100,000 video clips are the more popular ones. Not necessarily. Remember, YouTube is an international phenomenon; you can find things like Korean soaps, Taiwanese pops, and Turkish tv like this one that has nearly 300,000 hits:
http://www.yout...h?v=mdhP3GVvZ8w
#14 makes a very good point. Listen to him suits!
Why should VIA help GOOG become another intermediary? Here comes the internet that gives VIA and its content buddies the opportunity to bypass the Comcasts and TimeWarner Cables. But now GOOG wants to reinsert itself in the flow so that the 1st place a viewer goes to see last night’s Colbert report is YouTube not MotherLode. It makes no sense for VIA et al to give GooTube anything at all. There’s no financial settlement that makes sense. This is war without end.
Rather than ordering YouTube to take down copyrighted material that will inevitably resurface on dailymotion and other sites, Viacom and other copyright holders should actively push their own channels on YouTube and other video sites. This will give them better control over their content and finally a great viral marketing effect.
i think this is sad…if viacom has to sue becuase there videos are crap…then they should just give up…