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The Vanishing YouTube Videos and a Look Behind the Scenes

By Pamela Jones et al.

It's Sunday, so let's not think about SCO.

Would you like to take a leisurely day trip with me, instead, so I can show you what's been happening in the Google/YouTube-Viacom litigation? There's been a hearing on a motion to compel discovery with some humorous elements to share with you, among other tidbits, that will show you a really effective lawyer at work educating the judge, who admits she's not a techie, on what might work well technically in resolving issues.

The big picture is that Google/YouTube has told the court that it would like to do discovery to prove one of its main points in the litigation, that Viacom is in a better position to police its own copyrighted materials, rather than trying to shift that burden on to YouTube, a mere service provider.

In support of its discovery motion, YouTube points out that sometimes copyright holders like Viacom and its partners selectively enforce copyright infringement, uploading their own copyrighted materials to YouTube for marketing purposes while at the same time they, or their agents, are sending YouTube cease and desist orders. YouTube would like to do discovery to show that sometimes Viacom knows that its content is on YouTube but, for promotional purposes, and does not ask to remove it, and that since Viacom acquiesces sometimes to its content appearing on YouTube and sometimes it doesn't, it makes it impossible for a service provider like YouTube to tell by simply looking whether any particular video clip is or isn't allowed to be there. The copyright holder is uniquely in a position to know what is and isn't allowed, because only it knows both what it owns and what others can and can't do with it.

Full post as published by Groklaw on March 29, 2009 (boomark / email).