Viacom v. YouTube: Three Cautionary Tunes
It’s not often that I simultaneously think of songs by the Smiths, Britney Spears, and Pete Seeger. But Viacom’s lawsuit against YouTube has me humming a few tunes.
It starts with Morrissey’s plea: “Stop me if you think that you’ve heard this one before…”
Let’s go back to 2001 and the record companies taking on Napster. Napster, of course, was enabling the illegal downloading of copyrighted songs.
The music industry gets upset, sues Napster, wins, and then… Kazaa pops up. Unlike Napster, Kazaa lacks a central server. The record labels are equally upset, sue Kazaa, and drive it out of business. But, then, up pops eMule, which has neither a central server nor corporate offices. Who are you gonna sue?
By going after Napster, the record companies unleashed a sequence of events that made the song swapping more starfishlike (decentralized) and thus much more difficult to control.
Which brings us to Ms. Spears: “Oops, [they] did it again.”
Viacom has a good chance of prevailing against YouTube. And, as Viacom’s lawyers are happy to know, being owned by Google, YouTube has a corporate entity plenty big enough to sue.
But what will happen when and if Viacom wins its lawsuit? People aren’t likely to just give up on watching unlicensed video. They are likely, however, to turn to more starfish services which might not make a lot of money but will be much more difficult to pursue. In other words, Viacom is opening up a huge Pandora’s box.
As Pete Seeger ponders, “When will they ever learn? When will they ever learn?”
It’s not that Viacom is stupid; far from it. They’re protecting their intellectual property. But at the same time, applying top-down thinking to an industry that is becoming increasingly distributed leads companies to repeat the mistakes of the not-so-distant past.