YouTube uses its users to steal from the work of honest artists toiling to create original content, says Viacom as it finally sues YouTube for “massive intentional copyright infringement”:

YouTube is a significant, for-profit organization that has built a lucrative business out of exploiting the devotion of fans to others’ creative works in order to enrich itself and its corporate parent Google. Their business model, which is based on building traffic and selling advertising off of unlicensed content, is clearly illegal and is in obvious conflict with copyright laws. In fact, YouTube’s strategy has been to avoid taking proactive steps to curtail the infringement on its site, thus generating significant traffic and revenues for itself while shifting the entire burden – and high cost – of monitoring YouTube onto the victims of its infringement.
- Viacom Press Release

Viacom wants $1 billion in damages and an injunction stopping YouTube from showing any more of its content.

More corporate copyright capers. The pure bashment anarchy enjoyed at the Royal Courts of Justice in London on the opening day of Apple vs. Apple as QC Geoffrey “Loudmouth” Vos, resplendent in what excited journalists took to be an Adidas hoodie, chopped from the classic disco of Chic’s Le Freak to the big street hot riddims of Coldplay’s Speed of Sound while waving Hunter S Thompson’s pump-action wordage in the air -

the music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.

- Hunter S Thompson, Daily Variety (Sub Req)

- gave way to the tired realisation yesterday that iPods were now ordinary, that this was just another squabble between big corporations over copyright lucre. Mr Justice “Notda” Mann cut short an explanation from the lawyers of how Apple’s iLife suite works - “I’ve got it and I use it” - and thereby opportunities for any further zeitgeist-defining or comedic legal sitcom moments.
- Daily Mirror

Viral video enthusiasts using YouTube: potential copyright infringers or corporate shills?

YouTube’s DIY video site includes clips “stolen” from big media companies, allege lawyers representing big media companies - the likes of NBC Uni, CBS and ABC.

But big media companies, or at least their marketeers, are starting to realise that mashed-up clips represent, forgive the marketing spiel, bottom-up branded content.

Loaded with slap-happy credibility because they appear to be generated by users rather than corporations, they create the buzz needed for ratings success - or so says YouTube:

There’s been a few examples of marketing departments uploading content directly to the site, while on the other side of the company their attorney is demanding we remove this content.

- Chad Hurley, YouTube co-founder: the Hollywood Reporter

Great new IP & Fair Use comic by Duke’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain:

Bound by Law translates law into plain English and abstract ideas into ‘visual metaphors.’ So the comic’s heroine, Akiko, brandishes a laser gun as she fends off a cyclopean ‘Rights Monster’ - all the while learning copyright law basics, including the line between fair use and copyright infringement.

- Brandt Goldstein, The Wall Street Journal online

From the Economist’s latest survey of patents and technology:

The granting [of] patents “inflames cupidity”, excites fraud, stimulates men to run after schemes that may enable them to levy a tax on the public, begets disputes and quarrels betwixt inventors, provokes endless lawsuits…The principle of the law from which such consequences flow cannot be just.

- The Economist, 1851 in The Economist, 2005

Impatient for the sixth Harry Potter? Why not try Harry Potter and the Trade Related International Property Agreement (TRIPS)?

With demand outstripping supply, Muggles around the world have resorted to publishing their own stories about the teenage wizard.

In China, there’s Harry Potter and Leopard-Walk-Up-to-Dragon; in Russia, Tanya Grotter and the Magic Double Bass; in Belarus, Porri Gatter and the Stone Philosopher; in India, Harry Potter in Calcutta.

Harry’s creator, JK Rowling, isn’t happy about this. Luckily for her, under the WTO’s TRIPS agreement, original authors ‘enjoy the exclusive right of authorizing adaptations, arrangements and other alterations of their works’. Using domestic legislation, Rowling is waving a wand over Potter clones in WTO countries; they’re disappearing.

But the WTO exists to increase trade, points out Tim Wu. Before the courts intervened, local authors were creating made-to-measure Potter stories. They were meeting needs which Rowling couldn’t supply. The adaptations didn’t dissuade Rowling from writing new Harry Potter stories. By highlighting the popularity of the Potter brand, they encouraged aspiring writers to enter the market. Now, with the adaptations nixed, overall trade in Potter has gone down.