SueTube: Technology Changed Morality

Written by Frank Smith

Friday, October 19. 2007 at 05:45 PM EDT 2 comments

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Watching Google and Viacom fight it out is like watching "Godzilla vs. Godzilla destroying some Japanese city and deciding which of the Japanese people are going to win," said attorney Kathleen G. Williamson today at SueTube: The Impact of User Generated Content, a panel hosted by CMJ in New York.

The panel focused largely on Viacom's $1 billion lawsuit against YouTube with much of the discussion surrounding Viacom's motivations for suing YouTube and what that means for artists, consumers, and businesses.

The panel was moderated by David Ardia from Harvard Law School. Panelists included: Steve Bryant from The Hollywood Reporter, Steve Ciabattoni from the Nielsen Company, the singer/songwriter Jonathan Coulton, and the attorney and anthropologist Kathleen G. Williamson, Esq.

After comparing Viacom and YouTube to two atomic super monsters, Williamson noted that the takedown notices Viacom sent out to YouTube users it claimed had posted unauthorized material showed that Viacom was as incapable of controlling copyrights as Google. Fair use laws have previously put the burden of copyright protection on the copyright holders to come out and say that their copyright had been violated.

While its lawsuit is still pending, Viacom is now setting out to control its content all by itself. You can see this in Viacom's unveiling of TV show-specific sites like TheDailyShow.com. But creating these specific destinations creates a whole new set of problems. "If all of the content lives with the content creator's websites, then the number of people that will see the content will go away," says Jonathan Coulton. Coulton has been able to carve out a successful music career by allowing his fans to distribute his music throughout YouTube. Or, as Steve Ciabattoni said, creating destination sites for individual TV shows is like Kelloggs owning its own grocery store.

The panel was skeptical of the television networks' abilities to create websites to host videos of their programs that actually benefit the user. Coulton mentioned attempting to watch an episode of Bionic Woman hosted on NBC.com. He'd hooked his TV up to his computer, but every six minutes or so the program would go from full screen to small screen and present the same pasta commercial. "NBC is not the best people to put together an infrastructure to present this stuff to us," he said.

Technology companies, on the other hand, understand how to create innovative sites that encourage interactivity and participation. People use a site like YouTube to discover new things and this can be done through seeing what similar users like. Nielson's Steve Ciabattoni suggested that people are "less likely to leave comments on a corporate website than on something like YouTube."

Panelists suggested that, had YouTube never existed, Viacom would have never had the impetus to move its programming online. This makes the purpose of User Generated Content Principles that much more confusing. Essentially, the wild west of online video where content was hosted and shared illegally is forcing the content owners to get their digital strategies in order. And they're not exactly happy about having to do it.

From a user's perspective, with so much content -- be it music or video -- available at their fingertips, it's become difficult for a user to determine whether or not they're doing something illegal by viewing or downloading content with such little effort.

"Technology changed morality," said Ciabattoni.