damaged people dot com

...Where one may make money, another may sue.

I imagine some new thinking about copyright in the age of the internet will come out of this. One hopes. Viacom has extremely deep pockets (like the Death Star), and I doubt they'll lose. But maybe the debate will yield a little more understanding.

I can actually see both sides of this one.

Google makes ad revenue showing clips that were made by another company, and thus said company doesn't get anything (monetarily). On the flip side... all those videos are posted by end users, and youTube only displays them. It also removes them when requested to by the copyright holder.

Of course, that didn't work so well as a defense for Napster.

In the end, they'll probably work a deal. And miftah's right about Viacom having deep pockets. They own friggin' everything!

bio wrote: Google makes ad revenue showing clips that were made by another company

Actually, no. Google makes money from conversions and clicks. If a user clicks on a banner, they make a little money. If then, the user actually buys something from the advertiser or converts they make serious money. As an aside, the difference in price for a click is like $.003 vs $.02, none of the amounts are appreciable at the transaction level. The way google can improve their income is to gain audience or improve targeting which improves clickthrough and conversion rates directly.

The problem is that google's conversion rates suck much butt. Their creatives don't encourage click through and their targeting is laughable. This creates a bit of a problem as the revenue per viewer per day for google/youtube is in the toilet so they don't have much money to pass on to the content providers.

Worse, there's no closed loop on the user base. Honestly, how many of you have EVER clicked on a google ad? How many have ever bought anything from a google advertiser? Now how many watch videos free of charge at youtube? I'm guessing you see the issue here.

Until Google/Youtube can control the content they provide, they will be making their incomes of the backs of others. This kinda goes in the face of the corporate mantra of "Don't be evil". I'm pretty sure the gaffers on the show they're pirating would like their damned royalties AND deserve them. Until they create a financial model that actually makes sense, they won't have the money to control their content.

In the end, I'm hoping the pirates get what they deserve.