On the day of the Google/YouTube acquisition, YouTube announced a with Universal Music. Apparently, Grouper and Bolt.com didn t get the memo.
Universal Music has come out swinging in their first online video-related against two of the lesser-known online video sharing websites, Bolt.com and Sony s recent acquisition, .
The lawsuit takes aim at the websites ability for users to swap pirated versions of its musicians videos and seeks as much as $150,000 for each incident of copyright infringement.
Bolt.com operates much like YouTube, allowing users to only view Flash versions of the videos in their web browser without any ability to copy the video to their physical computer. Shutdown Bolt.
com or remove any materials from the website, and they are no longer accessible by anyone. Alternatively, Grouper users can download the videos to their computer, iPod, or PSP. Thus, similar to how the old Napster operated with music, if a user downloaded a physical copy of a Grouper video to their computer, then the user will be able to view it indefinitely, even if Grouper were to shut down or remove the videos from Grouper.
com.
Surprisingly, other websites weren t mentioned in this lawsuit. is larger than both Grouper and Bolt.
com ( ) and a search for Universal Music artist Mariah Carey in several music videos of her, along with a pre-roll video advertisement for CareerBuilder. Another that wasn t named in the lawsuit is Guba, which has blatant copyright infringement occurring on their website as a result of their indexing pirated videos from Usenet. Despite teaming with the MPAA and supposedly with software called , users can easily view tons of music videos on Guba s website or download them to their computer, iPod, or PSP.
A on Guba for Universal Music artist Mary J. Blige, returned several of her music videos.
According to comScore, Bolt.
com had 8.1 million unique visitors in August and Grouper had 1.8 million whereas YouTube had 72.
1 million. This is big-dick waggin Universal made a deal with gooTube (I wished I owned the .com; excellent name for a porno site) so lawsuit time.
Warner and Fox want some gooTube action as well; but I guess I m one of the only ones to hear about it as it hasn t been reported here.
but its obvious the guys in the board-rooms, which run these companies see the 1.65 billion gooTube and its like blood in the water, here come the sharks they re probably teaming up, talking shit, playing golf, strategizing; etc its money time, and the content providers, the major ones can really pull out a can of some woop ass.
copyright violation is 150K per violation gooTube videos get on average 10K views for dancing to music?
do the math?
it ll probably end-up like an orgy, everyone trying to fuck everyone; but Google is the one everyone wants to rape she s pretty and has money and owns no content; yet if I was sony boom woop-ass on gooTube, if I was Fox, boom, woop ass on gooTube, guber, and grouper
from my perspective mySpace wins, gooTube becomes really boring (which it is now I can t find any of the latest CNN, Daily Shows, etc.
) and Google survives. Sony feels the pain, but makes a turn around after re-aligning the whole company (sony is pretty messed up right now); and the content makers earn some money from their out of date catelogs.
just my perspective of course, my company, comes out smelling like a rose Now INAL, but I do know that the filing of a suit(s) of this nature didn t happen overnight.
More often than not a lot of back-and-forth had already taken place, negotiations, threats blah blah. And then there is issue of the selection of jurisdiction, practical mattters like assembling evidence and so on.
Just because everyone knows that there is potentially infringing material posted doesn t mean sh*t in court.
You gotta prove it and provide all the backup in the filings, and down the road.
So to my point other suits may or may not be in the works, or may or may not have been in the works for a while, against the other sites mentioned and unknown others.
It would be a mistake to draw a conclusion that these suits are a knee-jerk or opportunistic reaction to the YouTube deal, though, perhaps, some thought went into the timing of the actual filing.
Whatever the case, this should be interesting! Amit, I believe it would be something along the lines of documenting exactly how a piece of copyrighted material was found on the service. In painful detail, step-by-step.
times, places, who did the checking, what they did to access a file, what they observed. Then statements from the copyright holder saying yes that s our material and we did not license it.
Yeah, there may be screen-shots, and other electronic evidence as well.
But, these suits are not having a court decide or pass judgment. It s about forcing a settlement between the parties. Cases like this can take years in court.
This ll get settled in weeks, out of court.
We ve made overtures to Universal before now and we re hoping that they d like to have a robust dialog in the same way they did with YouTube, said Bolt s Cohen.
Once the precedent is set there ll be a lot of action and a lot of deals.
Not every site owner will back down, some may fight. Some will squeal like a pig. Some may move offshore.
And some may shutdown. Don t think for a minute that YouTube is immune from these types of lawsuits/saber rattling bacause of the Google acquisition announcement - remember the deal is not closed.
Once the $1.
65B valuation got put up there for everyone to see, there s a concrete measurement of value creation and the content owners want a piece of the pie.
An interesting thought exercise: Does anyone think Google/YouTube could fall through under certain ligitous conditions? The deal is not to close until end of 4th quarter.
If the deal looks to be too expensive, then I wonder what sort of out clauses is in the GooTube deal . I don t understand why any of these services would be liable for the material that the users of that service have uploaded.
As long as they remove infringing files that they have actual knowledge of aren t they safe?
Shouldn t a law-suite be filed against the user that has uploaded a file/shared it?
I bet they forbid copyright infringements by their TOS. So they are not actually trying to make revenue from the infringing files but from files that have been spread by the copyright holder.
So this is clearly an abuse of the service in my opinion. If the shared files would be moderated it would be different.
About making revenue from the videos: I don t think that bolt.
com for instance is making direct revenue from the videos. They are not selling them. Rather they have an ad on the page that shows the video (along with other content).
I m very interested in the outcome of this lawsuit. I think what is going to happen is that bolt.com for instance will be asked to give out the data of the users that have infringed the copyrights.
@Florian,
I understand your position, but I don t agree with it. Are they giving back money to content owners when they take down material that they arleady received ad $$ s from? No.
Also, in the sale to Google(which is a *huge* liquidity event and will make lots of money for YouTube) will YouTube go through and remove all copyrighted content from it s inventory before the sale is completed? Again, I don t think so, and thus they will directly profit from this material. So the founder s, employees, and investors will personally gain from ill-gotten goods.
In the end it doesn t matter what you and I think, it ultimately comes down to 2 simple decisions that we don t control and can only speculate upon.
Clearly, b) need clarification. Personally, I don t think YouTube (and it s ilk) falls under the Safe Harbour provisions of the DCMA, but I m not a lawyer and not a supreme court justice.
And neither is you. Given the large stakes now in the billions, I could easily see dozens of content owners joining resources ($$$, legal teams) to fight it out.
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