Ganging up on YouTube

IT was only a matter of time, really. As expected, NBC has also joined the bandwagon of companies who are suing YouTube.

Here’s an excerpt from the Agence France-Presse story:

NBC and Viacom are backing Los Angeles newsman Robert Tur, who filed suit against YouTube in July for letting users post his video of trucker Reginald Denny being beaten during riots in Los Angeles in 1992 in Los Angeles riots.

“We are confident in our legal case, and more importantly in the tremendous benefit of giving creators a place to post and discuss their videos, whether it be an individual’s family video or the BBC’s decision to partner with us to host their content,” Google said on Monday in response to an AFP inquiry.

“We meet and exceed our responsibilities under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which balances an easy takedown process and provides complete safe harbor for hosts such as YouTube.”

The Viacom-NBC alliance, revealed in a US district court filing in California on Friday came as YouTube was hit with a class-action copyright violation suit filed by English football’s Premier League in New York State.

Will all this eventually spell the end of YouTube as we know it? Will YouTube become online video’s version of Napster?

I hope not. If we look at the history of music downloads, it wasn’t the music companies who resisted technology and fair pricing as long as they could which made the digital revolution possible. It was Apple’s iTunes, and, let’s face it, the fact that peer-to-peer networks and online piracy had become so popular among consumers that forced music companies to adapt to change.

For all the lip service music companies now pay to music downloads, let’s not forget that if they had their way, they’d charge us an arm and a leg, while restricting use of what we already paid for via Digital Rights Management.

So God forbid if the future of online video would ultimately depend on the whims of TV executives who long resisted the Internet and the advent of online content, but who are now pretending they were Internet believers from the very start.

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