Blog Archives

Viacom's hope of winning a [billion dollar copyright infringement case ](/bus-news/article.php/3665256)against Google and YouTube suffered a serious blow today.

That's because today U.S. District Court Judge Louis Stanton granted Google's motion for summary judgment in the long-running case, ruling in favor of YouTube. Viacom's suit accused Google's YouTube of massive copyright infringement and asked for $1 billion in damages. Viacom said it will appeal the ruling.

YouTube had argued it was protected by the safe harbor provision of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) against claims of copyright infringement. Essentially, the DMCA says a website is protected if it unknowingly allows copyrighted material to be posted and removes it once notified by the copyright holder.

"This is an important victory not just for us, but also for the billions of people around the world who use the Web to communicate and share experiences with each other," said Google's vice president and general counsel Kent Walker in a blog post. "We're excited about this decision and look forward to renewing our focus on supporting the incredible variety of ideas and expression that billions of people post and watch on YouTube every day around the world."

Viacom, whose massive media holdings include MTV, VH1, CMT, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central and Paramount Pictures, had a very different take and said it planned to appeal the ruling.
Viacom confident of winning appeal

We are disappointed with the judge's ruling, but confident we will win on appeal," Michael Fricklas, Viacom's executive vice president, general counsel & secretary, said in a statement.

"Copyright protection is essential to the survival of creative industries. It is and should be illegal for companies to build their businesses with creative material they have stolen from others," Fricklas continued. "Without this protection, investment in the development of art and entertainment would be discouraged, and the many artists and producers who devote their lives to creating it would be hurt. Copyright protection is also critical to the Web -- because consumers love professional content and because legitimate websites shouldn't have to compete with pirates."
He also indicated Viacom has less, if any problem with the way YouTube has operated since the suit was filed:

"YouTube and Google demonstrated that required tools to limit piracy aren't impossible to find or even that difficult to implement -- they fixed the problem of rampant piracy on YouTube after Viacom filed this lawsuit.

"Before that, however, YouTube and Google stole hundreds of thousands of video clips from artists and content creators, including Viacom, building a substantial business that was sold for billions of dollars. We believe that should not be allowed by law or common sense," said Fricklas.

The judge said the two sides should confer about any remaining issues requiring judicial attention in the case and file a report by July 14.

FOSTER CITY, Calif. -- Flock CEO Shawn Hardin is sure about one thing when it comes to sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. "The social network tsunami is not going away," Hardin told me in a briefing here that included a demo of the company's new social browser. Flock created the "social browser" category when it released the first Flock browser built on Mozilla's Firefox back in 2005.

Wednesday, the company released a redesigned version of Flock developed for Google's Chromium open source platform. Flock adds social media navigation to Google's Chrome browser, which has been lauded for its speedy performance.

Flock users will also be able to tap the growing catalog of Chrome extensions that number in the thousands. The redesign offers more screen real estate in a right hand column to monitor and interact with social media content. For example, you can retweet, post to Facebook or share content with your friends on social media sites without leaving the Web page you're on.

"There's a fundamental disconnect between the social space and the browser that's a key opportunity for us," said Hardin. Flock now also integrates Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) search by default, in a switch from Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO) which users can still choose as an option.

The basic idea behind Flock's social browser is that in addition to surfing the Web, users can keep all their social media assets in one place, including videos, pictures, status updates and tweets. Users can display multiple Twitter accounts along with Facebook, Flickr and YouTube as well as any RSS or ATOM feeds. Social media content and contacts can also be grouped so, for example, you can have a specific group for your extended family or specific set of friends, or a particular interest like sports cars or smartphones.

**Coming soon: integration with LinkedIn, Mac version**

You can also search your friends, feeds and favorite Web sites on specific topics using the Flock Explore search bar. Later this summer Flock plans to offer integration with LinkedIn which should be of interest to business and professional users. A Macintosh version is also in development for release later this summer.

Hardin concedes Flock is not for everyone --- the company is targeting active social media users - but notes it's getting harder to find anyone not on at least one of the popular social networks. "We were founded when the social Web was very leading edge, now there are close to a billions folks that are active on social networks," he said.

Flock has attracted over 17 million downloads to date which Hardin said is a pretty impressive figure given the growth was generated almost entirely by word of mouth. With the new release "we're focused on getting to 100 million downloads," he said.