• Viacom Summary Judgment Motion (pdf)
• Viacom Statement of Undisputed Facts (pdf)
• Google Summary Judgment Motion (pdf)

• Viacom claims that YouTube employees uploaded infringing content themselves, and discussed this over email -- though, the filings carefully provide only fragments of the emails, which could easily have been taken out of context. And, even on top of that nowhere does Viacom explain how YouTube employees could distinguish which content was actually infringing and which was put up for promotional purposes or what was fair use. This is a major weakness in Viacom's motion.
• Viacom's secondary arguments get weaker as you go down the list. It argues that because YouTube uses advertising to make money, that shows the company directly profits from infringement. That argument makes no sense -- because it would effectively wipe out any safe harbors for any commercial operation, which clearly was not the intent of Congress. Based on this argument, any ISP that hosts content from a paying customer loses its safe harbors. That's ridiculous on its face.
• Viacom argues that Google could have blocked uploads with fingerprinting technology it had licensed, but fails to note the massive weaknesses in those fingerprinting technologies (which we still see thanks to Google's bad automated takedowns). It tries to bolster this argument by saying that Google refused to use the fingerprinting on Viacom content unless Viacom agreed to license its content to YouTube. Perhaps there's more to it than this, but I think that's also taking Google statements out of context. The way the fingerprinting works is that Google would need copies of the content to be able to recognize them -- and the only way to do that is if Viacom licensed works to them.
• Then the arguments get really weak. Viacom says that Google isn't just a secondary infringer, but a direct infringer, due to the terms of service that say you're granting a license to YouTube, and because to work, YouTube converts uploaded video to Flash. This is a weird legal argument that has been rejected before.
• The crux of Viacom's argument rests on trying to break the DMCA safe harbors because Google and YouTube execs knew that there was a lot of infringing content on the site. But Viacom's argument breaks down entirely when you realize it doesn't explain how Google could ever make the actual determination of which videos are infringing. Viacom tries to get around this with some legal tap dancing, basically saying that it doesn't matter and Google just should have known what was infringing and what was not. But that makes no sense. Viacom is basically saying Google should have had a magic wand to figure out what's infringing and make it disappear. That's impossible. No law could possibly require Google to do the impossible. The fact that some of the videos Viacom sued over were uploaded by Viacom itself proves this point clearly.
• Viacom argues that because YouTube "licensed" its videos to Apple and Verizon Wireless phones, it shows that it's more than just a passive service provider. Again, this seems like a weak overall argument, as what YouTube was doing was licensing access to the videos in a more convenient format, not claiming control over the videos themselves.
• Viacom's lawyers also have a bit of fun at the fact that some old emails relevant to the case were deleted, even though it's not that ridiculous that not everyone keeps all their emails. The motion also mocks Google and YouTube execs for developing "serial amnesia" when presented with "evidence." But, again, Viacom was asking people to remember specific sentence fragments (potentially taken out of context) from years-old emails.
• The "big surprise" in the Google motion is that Viacom apparently tried to buy YouTube itself. While interesting as a historical nugget, I'm not really sure that really helps the case one way or the other. It doesn't change how Viacom may have viewed YouTube as a platform. The attempted purchase may just have been a way to try to co-opt it into a limited platform, like what happened with Napster.
• Google argues that it has gone above and beyond the DMCA's requirements in providing tools to help copyright holders. Viacom's counter argument, of course, is that those changes are more recent.
• For every claim made by Viacom that Google/YouTube execs made damning statements, it looks like Viacom's statements were even worse. For example: During these negotiations [to license content] Viacom deliberately allowed its content to remain on YouTube, in part because it thought that "having the content there was valuable in terms of helping the rating of our shows." Google effectively makes the case that Viacom knew the benefits of having its clips on YouTube, tried to negotiate with YouTube for a deal, and when Google came into the picture, basically Viacom just saw it as an easy money grab and massively upped its demands before suing. Google argues that the mass takedown and subsequent lawsuit was really just a negotiating ploy by Viacom to get an upper hand in the negotiations to squeeze more money out of Google.
• Amusingly, Viacom notes repeatedly in its own filings that YouTube didn't want to take down its videos because traffic to YouTube would suffer -- but Google counters by pointing out that it did take down all of Viacom's 100,000 takedown requests within hours and traffic to the site did not suffer and, despite Viacom's expectations to the contrary, traffic to Viacom's own sites did not soar. In other words, despite Viacom's over-inflated sense of how important Viacom's videos were to YouTube, the actual evidence suggests that Viacom was very, very wrong.
• Viacom tries to brush off the fact that it uploaded many videos itself, by saying (in a footnote) that most of those videos were clearly designated as being from Viacom. Google counters by pointing out that (a) this is not true and (b) Viacom repeatedly disguised who uploaded those videos on purpose -- even quoting Paramount's SVP of marketing saying that the clips "should definitely not be associated with the studio -- should appear as if a fan created and posted it." Among the users who uploaded Viacom clips on behalf of Viacom itself? MMysticalGirl8, Demansr, tesderiw, GossipGirl40, Snackboard and Keithhn On top of that, they registered with non Viacom email addresses, and even went to the local Kinkos to avoid uploading from Viacom directly. How Google was supposed to distinguish those clips from those uploaded by random users is not explained anywhere by Viacom, which is a hugely damning point against Viacom's case.
• Further damning to Viacom's case -- the fact that Viacom regularly had to backdown on its takedown notices after it was realized that the takedowns were incorrect. This is a point that we've made before and is driven home repeatedly in Google's filing. If Viacom itself can't get it right -- when it holds the copyrights and some of the videos were uploaded by itself -- how the hell is Google supposed to know which videos are legit and which are not?
• Even more amusing is the part that details how Viacom had incredibly complex and detailed rules with BayTSP (who monitored YouTube and sent the takedowns) over what should be taken down and what should be left up. Apparently, those rules changed every few days and the folks at BayTSP compared them to Crime and Punishment. Again, if Viacom required such a complex list of rules for its own partner, how could it expect Google to know what to do without knowing any of that information?
• Google also points out that many of the clips in question have serious questions over whether or not they could be considered fair use -- and those are questions for a court to determine. It is both unfair and outside the scope of the law to expect a third party like Google to be able to make that kind of decision on the fly.

Continue reading SlingPlayer for Android coming this summer, demoed on video

SlingPlayer for Android coming this summer, demoed on video originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 18 Mar 2010 15:31:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

In the second set of documents released today from Viacom’s $1 billion lawsuit against Google (NSDQ: GOOG) over YouTube’s posting of its copyrighted works, e-mails among the video site’s three primary founders Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawad Karim, demonstrate the debates the trio had over how to handle unauthorized content. The e-mails, from the first year of YouTube’s existence, detail clear concerns and veer to outright indifference among the founders and about how it should handle the issue.  For the most part, Hurley is mostly worried about creating ill-will among large media companies he hoped would pay “big money” to acquire YouTube. The court documents also reveal the specific payouts the founders, along with their investors, received after Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion over three years ago. (The full PDF can be downloaded here; for a summary of Google’s arguments, see Joseph Tartakoff’s piece here)

Twitter est un service puissant et largement plus ouvert que n’importe quel site internet dit « 2.0 ». Sa structure et son api permettent par exemple d’utiliser le service sur des applications plus efficaces que le site lui-même.

Cette souplesse permet égalements à Twitter de s’intégrer dans les réseaux sociaux tels que LinkedIn, MySpace ou bien Facebook.

Mais cette année, Twitter devrait aller beaucoup plus loin grâce à sa plateforme @anywhere.

Techniquement, @anywhere va permettre à des sites tierces de profiter directement de la capacité de communication de Twitter.

L’explication est encore assez floue mais on peut imaginer par exemple, que le simple fait d’ajouter une ligne de JS sur votre site transformera tous les liens @quelquechose en lien dynamiques qui affichera un mini profil et les derniers tweet de la personne au survol.

En allant un peu plus loin, le fait de passer sur le lien de @unestardeciné devrait permettre d’interagir avec cette personne sans quitter le site en cours.

Les premiers partenaires seront Amazon, AdAge, Bing, Citysearch, Digg, eBay, The Huffington Post, Meebo, MSNBC.com, le New York Times, Salesforce.com, Yahoo!, et YouTube.

Bien que chez nous, on ne trouve pas encore d’interdiction de tweeter en cas d’incendie, le réseau de communication fait de plus en plus de bruit. Avec ce genre d’évolution, Twitter pourrait devenir de plus en plus populaire et même indispensable pour profiter de toutes les fonctionnalités des autres sites internet.

A suivre sur Twitter @anywhere

In response to opening briefs filed by Viacom today in its now three-year-old lawsuit against YouTube, the video-sharing site has posted some startling accusations about the hypocrisy of the media giant’s claims.

In a blog post, YouTube claims that at the same time Viacom was trying to sue YouTube into oblivion, it was secretly having its own content uploaded to the site. YouTube says that Viacom hired “no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies” who “deliberately ‘roughed up’ the videos to make them look stolen or leaked.”

Then, YouTube claims, Viacom would demand the takedown of content, but because of the mess that it created, “there is no way YouTube could ever have known which Viacom content was and was not authorized to be on the site.” YouTube also says that Viacom tried to acquire the company on numerous occasions (of course, Google ultimately won that battle).

Beyond those arguments, though, YouTube’s main legal defense is simply that it is protected by the DMCA, which puts the onus on copyright holders, not service providers, to keep track of and help enforce copyrights. Because of Viacom’s actions, however, YouTube says that thorough enforcement was impossible.

Viacom, however, contests that YouTube didn’t do enough to protect copyright content and built its huge following thanks in no small part to unauthorized content. It makes its most convincing case with a series of e-mails between the co-founders of YouTube, who at time seems more concerned with a big pay day than dealing with copyright issues.

YouTube certainly makes a compelling case, and considering the plethora of media companies that have moved on and now do content deals with YouTube, it’s hard to imagine Viacom finding much support, at least in the court of public opinion. Nonetheless, the case moves forward, and Viacom will ultimately have the chance to show that YouTube knowingly let copyright content stay on its site.

Tags: viacom, youtube

Erick Schonfeld / TechCrunch:
YouTube Defense: Viacom “Secretly Uploaded” Content, And They Tried To Buy Us  —  Earlier today, several previously sealed legal documents in the longstanding copyright infringement lawsuit against YouTube by Viacom were made public.  In conjunction with the public release of those documents …

In second set of documents released today from Viacom’s $1 billion lawsuit against Google (NSDQ: GOOG) over YouTube’s posting of its copyrighted works, e-mails among the video site’s three primary founders Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawad Karim. The e-mails, from the first year of YouTube’s existence, detail clear concerns and veer to outright indifference among the founders and about how it should handle unauthorized content on its site. For the most part, Hurley is mostly worried about creating ill-will among large media companies he hoped would pay “big money” to acquire YouTube. The court documents also reveal the specific payouts the founders, along with their investors, received after Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion over three years ago.

A trove of documents were unsealed in the long-running $1 billion copyright infringement suit Viacom (NYSE: VIA) filed against YouTube. We’re sorting through them now. In the meantime, here are some highlights:

—Google (NSDQ: GOOG) contends that Viacom in fact “overtly and covertly” uploaded to YouTube “thousands” of the company’s own clips in order to market them, using its own employees and as well as an “army of third-party marketing agents” to do so. In order not to be linked back to Viacom, the “agents” used names like ‘MysticalGirl8,’ ‘Demansr,’ ‘GossipGirl40’ and ‘Snackboard,’ while Viacom employees went to non-company locations—like Kinko’s—to upload the clips. Google says that “Viacom’s efforts to hide the source of the content it cause to be posted on YouTube were too good” and in fact some of the clips Viacom is suing YouTube for hosting were uploaded by the company.

—Viacom also decided not take down “thousands upon thousands” of clips from the site, Google says. For instance, when at one point Viacom found 316 clips from South Park on the site, it decided to take down only one and “pass” on the others.

A trove of documents were unsealed in the long-running $1 billion copyright infringement suit Viacom (NYSE: VIA) filed against YouTube. We’re sorting through them now. In the meantime, here are some highlights:

—Google (NSDQ: GOOG) contends that Viacom in fact “overtly and covertly” uploaded to YouTube “thousands” of the company’s own clips in order to market them, using its own employees and as well as an “army of third-party marketing agents” to do so. In order not to be linked back to Viacom, the “agents” used names like ‘MysticalGirl8,’ ‘Demansr,’ ‘GossipGirl40’ and ‘Snackboard,’ while Viacom employees went to non-company locations—like Kinko’s—to upload the clips. Google says that “Viacom’s efforts to hide the source of the content it cause to be posted on YouTube were too good” and in fact some of the clips Viacom is suing YouTube for hosting were uploaded by the company.

—Viacom also decided not take down “thousands upon thousands” of clips from the site, Google says. For instance, when at one point Viacom found 316 clips from South Park on the site, it decided to take down only one and “pass” on the others.

You can learn all sorts of interesting tidbits from legal documents. For instance, in one of the legal briefs unsealed today in the YouTube-Viacom dispute, such as the amount of money YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley made from the $1.65 billion sale of the company to Google in 2006. His take: $334 million (based on the November, 13, 2006 closing price of Google’s stock). In other words, the young CEO owned about 20 percent of YouTube at the time of the sale.

YouTube’s other co-founder Steve Chen’s stake was worth $301 million at the time of the sale, and the third co-founder Jawed Karim walked away with $66 million. Even YouTube interface designer Christina Brodbeck “received Google shares worth $9.09 million.”

The VCs did even better. Sequoia Capital, YouTube’s venture backer, turned a $9 million investment into $516 million (or about 31 percent of the total). And Artis Capital turned a $3 million investment into $85 million.

Another notable stat from the legal docs: in the past five years, more than 500 million videos have been uploaded to YouTube overall.

Court filings in the three-year old copyright infringement suit between Viacom and YouTube have finally been made public, which should make some interesting reading and take over the rest of my afternoon. But in the meantime, YouTube Chief Counsel Zahavah Levine has written a pretty damning post on the YouTube blog, condemning Viacom for having its employees pose as normal users to upload promotional content to the video-sharing site.

Asking for a summary judgment in the case, YouTube argues that it should be protected by safe harbor provisions in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which state that Internet hosts should not be found liable for content that is uploaded to their sites, so long as they respond to takedown notices issued by copyright owners within a reasonable period of time. In the blog post, Levine writes that the DMCA “recognizes that content owners, not service providers like YouTube, are in the best position to know whether a specific video is authorized to be on an Internet hosting service.”

Viacom might believe otherwise, arguing that YouTube should have done a better job of keeping copyrighted material off the site. But Levine argues that even if YouTube were tasked with doing so, Viacom’s actions would have made policing its content impossible. YouTube accuses Viacom of uploading its own content, and doing so in a way that made it difficult for YouTube to distinguish between its employees and common users. If true, the accusation is pretty damning. Levine writes:

The results were so effective, Levin writes, that Viacom couldn’t tell if a piece of content was uploaded by its employees or not, which resulted in Viacom demanding that some clips be taken down — and then later asking for them to be reinstated. “Given Viacom’s own actions,” Levine writes, “there is no way YouTube could ever have known which Viacom content was and was not authorized to be on the site.”

Related content on GigaOM Pro:

Will Automated Rights Management Take Down Fair Use? (subscription required)

Aaron / YouTube Blog:
Broadcast Yourself  —  Around the globe, YouTube has become a metaphor for the democratizing power of the Internet and information.  YouTube gives unknown performers, filmmakers, and artists new ways to promote their work to a global audience and rise to worldwide fame …

Miguel Helft / Bits:
Filings in Viacom's Suit Against Google Are Released  —  Thousands of pages of court filings that are part of Viacom's copyright infringement suit against Google, the owner of YouTube, were unsealed on Thursday.  The filings are the first significant revelations in the three-year-old lawsuit …

We've just started to look over the YouTube-Viacom lawsuit filings, but this jumped out at us before we dug in.

In a blog post, YouTube accuses Viacom of "continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube." YouTube says Viacom used "no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies" to put Viacom clips on YouTube.

Read the rest of this story »

See Also:

• The YouTube-Viacom Documents Are Now Available For Your Reading Pleasure!

Earlier today, several previously sealed legal documents in the longstanding copyright infringement lawsuit against YouTube by Viacom were made public. In conjunction with the public release of those documents, YouTube’s chief counsel Zahavah Levine wrote a blog post which reads more like a summary of a legal brief.

In it, Levine outlines YouTube’s main defense against Viacom’s allegations, including the fact that Viacom “secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there.” Levine also notes that “Viacom tried repeatedly to buy YouTube,” suggesting that the current $1 billion lawsuit is its attempt to cash in on YouTube years after the fact.

Here is the key passage from the blog post:

For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site. It deliberately “roughed up” the videos to make them look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube accounts using phony email addresses. It even sent employees to Kinko’s to upload clips from computers that couldn’t be traced to Viacom. And in an effort to promote its own shows, as a matter of company policy Viacom routinely left up clips from shows that had been uploaded to YouTube by ordinary users. Executives as high up as the president of Comedy Central and the head of MTV Networks felt “very strongly” that clips from shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report should remain on YouTube.

Viacom’s efforts to disguise its promotional use of YouTube worked so well that even its own employees could not keep track of everything it was posting or leaving up on the site. As a result, on countless occasions Viacom demanded the removal of clips that it had uploaded to YouTube, only to return later to sheepishly ask for their reinstatement. In fact, some of the very clips that Viacom is suing us over were actually uploaded by Viacom itself.

In other words, while Viacom’s lawyers were issuing takedown notices, its marketers were putting clips up on YouTube to promote Viacom movies and TV shows. You’ve got to wonder what the judge will make of that evidence.

The unsealed court documents in the YouTube-Viacom fight are now public.

Viacom has a page set up for all the information and documents here. YouTube has its own page explaining itself here.

Peter Kafka at All Things D has helpfully uploaded them to Doc Stoc. We're looking them over now.

Read the rest of this story »

See Also:

• Google Makes YouTube Text Overlay Ads Self-Serve
• Google, Viacom Still Negotiating On YouTube Logs, Employee Data
• Google, Viacom Still Talking About YouTube Data. On Deck: Chad Hurley And Steve Chen

Today, YouTube and Viacom unsealed many of the documents related to their longstanding copyright litigation, in which Viacom has sued Google for $1 billion. We’re embedding the documents, which were released minutes ago, below (it may take a few minutes to get them all posted).

YouTube’s Brief

Les futures télévisions seront hybrides et permettront, en plus du film du dimanche soir, de surfer sur le Net. Fort de ce constat très à la mode, Google s’est allié avec Sony et Intel afin de développer une plateforme visant à rendre plus intuitive la navigation sur Internet.

Google TV permettra par exemple d’afficher à l’écran des vidéos de YouTube ou de twitter directement depuis son canapé. Logitech a d'ailleurs été chargé de mettre au point une télécommande-clavier. C’est les publicitaires qui doivent se frotter les mains...

Continue reading Microsoft takes a note from Palm in new Windows Phone 7 Series ad

Microsoft takes a note from Palm in new Windows Phone 7 Series ad originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 18 Mar 2010 11:36:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Le géant de l’internet (et futur maitre du monde) Google serait en train de travailler sur un projet intitulé Google TV aux cotés de Sony, Intel et Logitech. Un boitier fonctionnant sous Android serait actuellement en développement et pourrait être intégré directement dans un téléviseur.

Sony s’occuperait évidemment de la partie téléviseur, Intel de la partie processeur avec ses Atom, et Logitech serait en charge de développer une télécommande équipée d’un petit clavier.

Le but étant d’intégrer sur nos téléviseurs une interface qui offrira un accès à Google, YouTube, Picasa, Gmail, Twitter, Facebook et sans doute d’autres applications qui verront le jour très bientôt. Un kit de développement sera d’ailleurs mis à disposition des développeurs d’ici environ deux mois. (via le NY Times)

Become the master of the world : ✓ Check

Best-selling March release ever.

Shopper enthusiasm for Battlefield: Bad Company 2 may not have been as fervent as for Modern Warfare 2, but DICE's shooter has gone on to break a record of its own, becoming the best-selling March release on record in North America and Europe.

Released in the first week of the month, Bad Company 2 has now sold over 2.3m copies - according to EA's internal counter.

Players have amassed 81bn points during online multiplayer battles and unlocked 43m weapons and gadgets. Also, more than 6m YouTube videos of gameplay have been recorded and the BFBC2 Twitter account has 44,000 fans - the most of any EA game and more than Eurogamer's Johnny Minkley.

Read more...