Paul's Comments

Viacom's lawyer has an op-ed piece in the Washington Post regarding its suit against Youtube hosting content which includes some of its copyrighted material. There is also the usual Peanut Gallery of comments on Slashdot, of which mine, of course is one, and it essentially repeats this article.

I sent the following comment in to the Washington, Post in response.

Mr. Fricklas' comnents are, for lack of a better term, a whiner who doesn't like the law as written and wants to sue to get something from the courts that the legislature has clearly denied him. His point that You Tube has knowledge of copyrighted content is not relevant. As his own statement has made, Congress gave sites immunity under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act for sites that quickly take down infringing material. He has not said that Youtube is not removing material when requested; indeed, my understanding is Youtube removes tens or hundreds of thousands of reported clips all of the time. Here, also, he is in effect saying that because Youtube has the capacity to remove material either because it is unlawful or in some way undesirable, Youtube is infringing because of the very controls it is required by law to have to remove infringing material! If Youtube didn't have controls to remove the material, I'm sure that then he'd be claiming that it was not properly designed to comply with the law!

He also writes, "Is it fair to burden YouTube with finding content on its site that infringes others' copyright? Putting the burden on the owners of creative works would require every copyright owner, big and small, to patrol the Web continually on an ever-burgeoning number of sites. That's hardly a workable or equitable solution."

The only problem with his argument is that that has been the exact requirement for the past 200 or so years that copyright has existed; the copyright owner is required - and has always been required - to police his copyrights - and no amount of whining about how a requirement - in existence for hundreds of years - to be changed because he doesn't like it is valid. I'd like to remind this lawyer of a comment by the U.S Supreme court regarding how one obtains one's rights over something:

"The privilege... is neither accorded to the passive resistant, not to the person who is ignorant of his rights, nor to one who is indifferent thereto... It is valid only when insisted upon..." McAlister v. Henkle, 201 U.S. 90.

My guess is that this whole lawsuit is nothing more than a bargaining chip so that Viacom can make more money off their content. Since, like so many other whiney losers, he can't figure a way to negotiate in the marketplace, he goes running to the courts to try and get what he can't win at the bargaining table.

Paul Robinson
General Manager

Viridian Development Corporation
Arlington, Virginia

Note: After writing this, I realized a great comment as to what the suit represents. Viacom's lawyer, in effect is saying, "All YouTube are belong to us!"