Cutting off your nose to spite your face

From The New York Times:

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., April 30 — Responding to Viacom’s $1 billion copyright infringement suit over video clips on YouTube, Google said Monday that it would not back off, declaring that the law was on its side.

“We are not going to let this lawsuit distract us,” Michael Kwun, managing counsel for litigation at Google, told reporters.

In its response to the lawsuit, filed Monday in Federal District Court in Manhattan, Google said that Viacom’s claims were unfounded and asked for a judgment dismissing the complaint.

In March, Viacom, the parent company of MTV, Comedy Central and Nickelodeon, sued Google and YouTube, the video sharing site it acquired last year, saying they were deliberately building a business on a library of copyrighted video clips without permission. Earlier this year, Viacom had asked YouTube to take down 100,000 clips that it said infringed on its copyrights.

Google’s court filing gives few new details of its legal thinking, which relies heavily on the so-called “safe harbor” provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, enacted in 1998. Those provisions generally hold that Web sites’ owners are not liable for copyright material uploaded by others to their site as long as they promptly remove the material when asked to do so by the copyright owner.

The 1998 law “balances the rights of copyright holders and the need to protect the Internet as an important new form of communication,” Google said in its filing. “By seeking to make carriers and hosting providers liable for Internet communications, Viacom’s complaint threatens the way hundreds of millions of people legitimately exchange information, news, entertainment, and political and artistic expression.”

Viacom said Google’s response misses the mark. “This response ignores the most important fact of the suit, which is that YouTube does not qualify for safe harbor protection under the D.M.C.A.,” Viacom said. “It is obvious that YouTube has knowledge of infringing material on their site, and they are profiting from it.”

I understand the importance of intellectual property protections; unlike some of the more wacked out libertarians who think that once a copy of a song or movie/TV show or book has been sold commercially that anyone who wishes to do so should be able to copy it and sell it, give it away or upload it to the 'net without asking permission or paying any royalties.

Were that to become the law of the land it would no longer be worth the trouble for Sony to make movies like Spiderman 3 because it could be pirated the day it was released to theaters and DVD manufacturers, movie theaters and TV networks could show it without paying Sony. The tens of millions of dollars which they invested in the production of the film would not be earned back, the actors and writers would not receive their residuals and Sony's shareholders would receive no profit.

The production of new Books, movies, CDs, DVDs and even television shows would dry up. After all if Stephen King knows that his next book will be copied and distributed on the black market with no money coming back to him why would he bother to write any more? (OK, its an ill wind that blows no good, but you get my point)

Youtube, however, is not the same thing. I have comments on my blog and emails from readers thanking me for turning them on to particular singers or bands or the Celtic music genre itself. I know from looking at my reports from the Amazon associates program that people are buying the CDs and DVDs that the clips which I show are taken from.

The entertainment industry needs to understand that this represents hundreds of millions of dollars worth of free advertising. There is no question that the recording industry has a legal right to object to any case of copyright infringement, however they don't wind up losing more than they gain by shutting down a website which is little more than a giant commercial hawking their wares for them.