There was never much doubt that Viacom’s $1 billion copyright-infringement lawsuit against YouTube would fail. Most legal and media observers predicted a result not unlike the one handed down today by a federal judge who granted summary judgment for the Google-owned video-sharing site. Basically the judge said copyright-protected clips uploaded by YouTube users are protected under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act as long as YouTube takes down the clips when copyright-holders ask.
Even if it didn’t surprise, the ruling is still still sort of a symbolic moment that, if Viacom and other big content companies interpret it correctly, could lead them out of a Luddite frame of mind that has no room for a realistic understanding of how content is consumed and distributed today.
Here’s what needs to come next:
1. Media companies need to see consumers as their friends. The substance of Viacom’s lawsuit might have been about copyright and about changing YouTube’s behavior with regard to copyright, but it was by extension also an attack on the very people who are the end user of professional content. The Viacoms of the world can interpret the will to upload good clips of Jon Stewart or South Park or its other shows as something that results in smaller audience and costs them revenue. But it’s just that — an interpretation. These companies can also choose to see it as a readymade distribution network on a massive scale. They’re the people helping to make shows buzzworthy and drive audience and attention. Yes, YouTube makes money off Viacom’s work, but now without doing some marketing work in the process.
2. On a more tactical level, Viacom needs to get a licensing deal of some sort done with YouTube, as so many other media companies have done. This of course will never happen At this point, an appeal looks inevitable — and pointless in the absence of any evidence that the appellate courts will come out in Viacom’s favor. There’s a middle ground between resistance to the digital reality and the need to protect copyright. At this point, Viacom has taken severe damage to its once-strong brand as the forward-thinking content player that created MTV and Comedy Central. A cease fire would go far in making Viacom seem like it understands the world around it and isn’t kicking and screaming as its dragged into a new era.
3. While this is a major victory for Google and YouTube, there are others to be fought. Most urgently, YouTube needs to find a clear path to monetization. With preroll, annoying overlays and all kinds of sponsored content deals all over the site, the user experience on YouTube has declined, even if traffic hasn’t. With all those ads slapped all over the site, you’d think there’d be more headway in making it pay, that doesn’t seem to be the case as analysts generally regard the site as a loss-maker. (Google isn’t transparent about YouTube’s performance, but one YouTube executive has predicted profitability this year.) Google, of course, is loaded down with cash so YouTube’s monetization lag matters only so much. And the site is still young. But at some point it’ll become vital to turn all of those eyeballs and uploads into moolah.
