Eideard

Viacom board of directors meeting

Google won a landmark victory over media companies as a Manhattan federal judge threw out Viacom Inc’s $1 billion lawsuit accusing the Internet company of allowing copyrighted videos on its YouTube service without permission.

Viacom claimed “tens of thousands of videos on YouTube, resulting in hundreds of millions of views,” had been posted based on its copyrighted works, and that the defendants knew about it but did nothing to stop illegal uploads.

But in a 30-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Louis Stanton said it would be improper to hold Google and YouTube liable under federal copyright law merely for having a “general awareness” that videos might be posted illegally.

“Mere knowledge of prevalence of such activity in general is not enough,” he wrote. “The provider need not monitor or seek out facts indicating such activity…”

The lawsuit went to the heart of perhaps the biggest issue facing media companies in the last decade: how to win Internet viewers without ceding control of TV shows, movies and music.

It was seen as a test of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a 1998 federal law making it a crime to produce technology to circumvent anti-piracy measures, and limiting liability of online service providers for copyright infringement by users.

New York-based Viacom is controlled by Sumner Redstone and owns cable networks such as MTV and Comedy Central as well as the Paramount movie studio.

They are typical of the Ferengi who control much of the entertainment “industry” around the world. And industry it is.

All else is myth. Including the Fair Use doctrine which is supposed to give consumers a couple of old-fashioned rights to do with what we spend our dollars and pennies on.

John Young is a brave and tenacious man, an architect based in New York whose website, cryptome.org, has been a safe online repository for documents that someone, somewhere does not want published…

Thanks to a robust policy on the part of his current internet service provider, his site has remained online despite the best efforts of those who are embarrassed by its contents.

Until last month, that is, when cryptome.org disappeared from the internet after Network Solutions disabled access to the site’s domain.

Mr Young had not revealed military secrets that put the lives of soldiers at risk, or published the finer details of Britain’s nuclear deterrent capability. The document that got the site kicked offline was not a detailed map of the presidential escape route from the White House, or a list of the lobbyists who have visited Downing Street in the last year, but a 22-page document written by Microsoft.

It details how US government agencies can request access to customer data stored on Microsoft servers, like your Hotmail messages, and Microsoft used copyright law to achieve what the US government could not.

It seems that copyright, a legal framework developed over 300 years to ensure a balance between the interests of the wider community and those of the creative artist has become so tipped towards those of the “rights holder” that few of us can go through a day without breaking the law in one way or another…

This has got to stop. We have to say “enough is enough” to those who hold copyrights in songs and images and words and videos. We must refuse to remake the digital world in order to serve only their interests…

It would be a tragedy if the network the people of East Africa found, now that they have fast fibre links to the rest of the internet, was locked-down, limited and restricted by laws passed to placate fearful Western rights holders and they decided, as a result, that it wasn’t worth joining.

I’ve been online since 1983. RTFA.

Timorous, reactionary cowards that characterize the world of Anglophone bureaucracy have always been a risk. The newer autocracy of beancounters and their lawyers that grows and envelops the Internet from twin centers of greed in Washington, DC and Hollywood is at least as threatening.