Google to pay Viacom $500 million to settle lawsuit

OK, that's only my prediction. Viacom has just decided to sue Google for $1 billion, and it may be a while before this is settled. But I believe Google is likely to lose the suit from Viacom unless it takes evasive action. Given current copyright law, which overwhelmingly supports copyright holders, Google will have a tough time with this one.

Maybe Google will settle for half that much and then make some adjustments to its practices, after getting the courts to concede as much protection as possible.

Viacom will get sympathy when it cries about its expensive content being usurped. It will not express the opinion that this might be free advertising. Google won't be able to get away with making that argument. Google will argue DCMA protection. which has a safe harbor provision if a site's users (not the owner of the site) are the ones doing the posting and if the site owner promptly removes them. YouTube is not prompt about it. Viacom says YouTube has displayed 160,000 clips of its copyrighted material and refuses to take them down.

But then, it was expected. Mark Cuban notoriously pointed out last October that Google's acquisition of YouTube would bring lawsuits. I tend to agree.

I'm also intellectually and emotionally on Google's side on this. Eventually, we'll get used to the internet as a new medium and all this fighting will seem silly in the future. But Google will have to pay some big bucks in the meantime.

The posts on  Slashdot are interesting. They range from "Anonymous Coward," who thinks Viacom is ignoring free advertising benefits and that Google should  frop all Viacom sites fromm Google.com, to ePhil_One (634771), who welcomes the "new Google overlords."

It just shows how unsettled all this is. It's a shame. We should just accept the inevitable. Piracy and freely sharing copyrighted material is inevitable. This is the internet. Deal with it.

Comments

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Ithink that google will drop viacom from their index on all thier properties.. they did this for a a site in belguim some time ago.. nobody can sue google for not being in their SE !! :)-

[Richard Brandt]

It's an interesting point Peter, but may not stop the lawsuit. There's a lot of speculation now that Viacom wants to challenge the DCMA protection and force Google's hand. It may pursue that even if Google drops Viacom from its index. And that could start another suit, since some companies have sued Google from dropping their sites. It's also not in the interest of Google users, and is counter to Google's goal of organizing and making available all the world's information. And some people would consider it an evil action.