Redlasso, a useful but controversial service that lets users grab video clips from television, has just established a Media Advisory Board to help manage relations with litigious content providers. The board includes former Viacom CFO Michael Dolan and former President of Paramount Station Group, Anthony Cassara. The additions come two weeks after the company added ex-CBS CEO Michael Jordan as a senior advisor.
Redlasso lets bloggers (and bloggers alone) clip portions of recorded television and embed it on their sites. The service is very convenient, as users can pull clips from hours of content across many popular television channels including CNN, Fox News, and ESPN.
Unfortunately, Redlasso hasn’t actually gotten the rights to any of this content. They claim that the clips embedded by bloggers fall under fair use, which is debatable. But they still have to answer for the thousands of television programs that are sitting on their servers for bloggers to browse through – something that is clearly a violation of copyright law.
Last month, Fox, CBS and NBC sent Redlasso a cease and desist notice demanding they remove copyrighted content from their site. The networks also claimed that Redlasso was trying to “falsely convey an affiliation between Redlasso and the Content Owners, when there is none”. In response, Redlasso declared that it would continue to make the site available while it “continues to work towards cooperative, mutually beneficial arrangements with those and other content providers” – essentially telling the networks to piss off.
Clearly Redlasso is looking to get their content deals hammered out (the site claims to have been talking to the networks for years). So will this growing team of ex-studio bigwigs help Redlasso with its legal troubles? Don’t count on it, especially given the fact that many of these networks are investing in sites like Hulu, which also allows bloggers to generate clips.
Interesting service. There is also an interesting copyright -related dilemma going on in Finland. There’s a company selling a service of a “online digital receiver with a 1000GB hard drive”. Of course the fact is that they are recording everything the TV channels are relaying and basically selling it to people as a “digital receiver” and thus avoiding paying copyright royalties for each individual tv-show.
This should lead to some law suits in the near future.
I would like to point out that a viable model for obtaining free, licensed, news, sports and entertainment content already exists at http://www.thenewsroom.com. Users may embed fully licensed news and information from more than 300 content sources as well as share in the advertising revenue. The Voxant Newsroom network currently consists of about 30,000 specialty websites and blogs.
We have been averaging more than 11 million unique visitors over the past 4 months, with more than 30 million video streams each month. These are not internal numbers, they are reported publically by the Internet audience measurement firm, comScore. Voxant has developed a viable economic model to distribute high-quality, professionally produced content to millions of viewers each month. In closing, Voxant has always believed that copyrights matter. We recognize that Web publishers, advertisers and content providers have everything to win from respecting licensing agreements.
Fred Krazeise
Voxant Media Relations
Thanks Fred for the tip! Redlasso is quite buggy on Firefox, so I’ll give your site a go.
Hey Lasse Holopainen seems like an intersting service, do you by any chance have a link to their site.
Unfortunately, Redlasso hasn’t actually gotten the rights to any of this content. They claim that the clips embedded by bloggers fall under fair use, which is debatable. But they still have to answer for the thousands of television programs that are sitting on their servers for bloggers to browse through – something that is clearly a violation of copyright law.
Josh:
The service seems to be available only in Finnish. Here’s the link though:
[url]http://saunalahti.fi/internet/saunavisio/[/url]
And my bad, they actually boast of a 5 terabyte recording capacity
We’ll see what happens when it becomes so popular that the networks start taking interest.
Btw, I’m not affiliated with the service, so don’t take this as spam
Lasse Holopainen thanks I didn’t know if you were reaferring to save.tv
There has been some talks about ‘Rethinking Copyright laws’. One of the most commented was that of TC editor Michael Arrington – which agrees with rethinking copyright laws . Another one, which disagrees with Michael is another interesting read. Keen: “Arrington’s position certainly threatens our culture.”
Did you see that CBS video clips and streaming CBS channel is no longer on RedLasso?
»»»»»»»» PAULA NEAL MOONEY: »»»»»»»» CBS Videos Removed From RedLasso – Now I don’t want to go on a rant here… »»»»»»»»
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