A recent court ruling gave the go signal for Viacom to access Youtube user logs in the ongoing copyright lawsuit between the former and Google worth $1 Billion. Viacom, 1; Google/Youtube, 0.
But why does Viacom want all those YouTube user logs? Simply put, Viacom wants to prove to the courts that people are viewing their original content in massive numbers and that this significantly affects their bottom line.
Does Viacom want all its copyrighted materials pulled off of Youtube? Yes, if Google doesn’t pay up.
Isn’t that a little greedy? Well, yeah, but read on.
Google wants to make money off of YouTube. It desperately wants to get back that $1.8 billion they spent to buy the video sharing site. Viacom merely wants to get a cut of that revenue because Google is milking money from contents owned by Viacom.
Google is already doing a profit sharing scheme with premium producers in Youtube for their original content. Viacom claims, if Google can do that revenue-split with other premium content producers, why not with Viacom? Makes sense.
So what will Viacom do with all those Youtube user logs? Well, the entertainment company might want gather how much of its content are uploaded on Youtube and how many people viewed it. Once they can prove that there’s significant number of views, it can justify it’s $1 billion claim.
Is there a better solution, one that is win-win for Viacom and Youtube users? Well, Google can just settle this out of court and do a revenue sharing deal with all these content producers. That way, we can still watch MTV clips or our favorite TV series episode on Youtube.
Viacom’s just trying to justify it’s greed. Period.