I knew it was going to happen sooner or later.  Viacom has filed a $1 billion copyright suit against Google, owner of the popular YouTube video sharing website.

I’m not a huge fan of YouTube, but I do see understand its popularity and place on the world wide web.  I’m not going to discuss the nitty-gritty of this particular lawsuit, but I would like to ramble about the idea in general.  Viacom is filing suit against Google over copyrighted material that is being posted on YouTube by its users.  This material mainly includes episodes of TV shows that are copyrighted and may not be re-broadcast in this manner.

I’ll start out by saying that I hope Viacom wins the lawsuit.  I doubt that it will happen though.  YouTube has no real control over what its users upload.  I setup an account for myself to see what sort of controls are in place to manage this, and there is only one, and it’s not really a control.  When I tried to upload a video, the upload screen displays the following notice before it allows you to send a video file:

Copyright Notice

Do not upload copyrighted material for which you don’t own the rights or have permission from the owner.

The YouTube system can’t evaluate an uploaded video file to determine if it’s copyrighted or not.  There is no way to do that.  It depends on its users to be honest.  Oddly enough, users upload copyrighted material anyway :)  YouTube is becoming (or has become) the Napster of video.

I don’t believe that Viacom will collect $1 billion from Google over this.  Google will simply defend themselves the same way Napster did by making the claim that they have no control over what their users share via the online system.  What will happen is that YouTube will either be forced to shut down or put controls in place to stop the infringements.

The internet is a strange place.  I have been meaning to buy a book I saw at the bookstore called The Psychology of the Internet for some light reading.   People don’t behave the same way when they are online as they would in the grocery store or the shopping mall.  We may sing at the top of our lungs in the shower or behind the wheel of our car, but we wouldn’t do it at a sporting event or walking down the street.  For some reason, it doesn’t seem wrong to download software that is available to us on a website without paying for it.  The same holds true for music files and video.  If the sytem never asks us for payment, why should we pay for it?

I believe that a majority of the people know what is right and wrong.  Whether or not we participate in the wrong is often determined by whether or not we think we’ll be caught.  If there is no penalty or embarrassment to be suffered, we’ll often do things that we would never consider doing under different circumstances.

There is also a very good argument out there that simply states that lots of people have no idea what copyright is or why it matters.  My 12-year-old niece has no clue what copyright is, but she does know how to get music from the internet to her iPod without having to pay anyone a dime.  She simply doesn’t understand, and no one has ever enlightened her.  If I chose to have a discussion with her on the topic, whe would then know what copyright is and why it matters.  Would she stop downloading ‘free’ music once she knows the difference?  I’m not sure, but I doubt it.  Why would she start paying for something that she is getting for free with no consequences?

I’m old enough to know what the internet was like in its public infancy.  I first accessed the internet via CompuServe back around 1992 or 1993… I’m not sure of the exact date, but there were no local internet service providers at that time.  Since then, the once primarily informational internet has exploded into a commercial maelstrom that sucks every web browser towards a page that asks for a credit card number.  The informational sources still exist, but they have become much more difficult to locate through search engines.  The information that is available may or may not be documented, but if you can see it in your web browser, you can have a copy of it for yourself, whether it’s copyrighted or not.

Some possible results of this free flow and distribution of information will include huge financial losses for the information and technology sources.  The music industry has become a big loser due to illegal sharing via the internet.  This and this article  show a rather alarming trend in music sales.  Fans used to be what made music successful.  Will those same fans (or the newest generation of fans) be what causes the industry to fail?

Just some food for thought…

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