Viacom Says "YouTube Depends On Us"

Anonycat writes "Michael Fricklas, a lawyer for Viacom, has an opinion piece in the Washington Post laying out Viacom's side in their $1 billion lawsuit against YouTube. Fricklas asserts that the DMCA's 'safe harbor' provisions don't apply because YouTube is knowledgeable to infringement and furthermore derives financial benefit from it. He also argues that putting the onus of spotting infringement onto the content providers represents an undue burden on them. Fricklas caps the argument by stating, 'Google and YouTube wouldn't be here if not for investment in software and technologies spurred by patent and copyright laws.'"

Al gore still...

[Anonymous Coward]

Al Gore still has the one up on creating the internet. We should all just sue him.

Anonymous Cow.

Pfft

[porkThreeWays]

We all know the real reason youtube is here is for candy mountain.

In other news : Viacom invented internet

[unity100]

"A viacom representative earlier today has revealed that Viacom was the main driving force and innovator behind Internet. Representative also shed light on the misassumption that internet was an unlimited number of computers networked, saying that internet is in fact "a series of tubes".

I propose an experiment

[N8F8]

Let's all drive Viacom out of business and see if YouTube is still around. Works for me.

What this suit really means

[rfc1394]

After I wrote a prior piece here, I realized a great (bad pun) quote that sums up Viacom's lawsuit.

Viacom's lawyer, in effect is saying, "All YouTube are belong to us!" [wikipedia.org]