Viacom Gets Tough With YouTube

Media giants Viacom International have finally lost patience with YouTube and demanded that they remove more than 100,000 of their video clips that have been posted up without permission.

The company – whose holdings include Paramount Pictures, MTV Networks, DreamWorks and Comedy Central – have calculated that YouTube has served up over 1.2 billion streams of its copyrighted video content.

As a result, Viacom have got out their big pointy DMCA stick and accused Google-owned YouTube of knowingly profiting from material stolen from them, as well as repeatedly breaking promises to filter out copyrighted works.

In a statement, a clearly miffed Viacom said: “Virtually every other distributor has acknowledged the fair value of entertainment content and has taken deliberate steps to concluding agreements with content providers.”

“YouTube and Google retain all of the revenue generated from this practice, without extending fair compensation to the people who have expended all of the effort and cost to create it.”

Google have said that they’ll get the material down tout de suite, although not without adding a valedictory grumble, commenting, “It is unfortunate that Viacom will no longer be able to benefit from YouTube’s passionate audience which has helped to promote many of Viacom’s shows.”

Removing Viacom’s rich portfolio of popular clips may certainly result in loss of revenue for YouTube, but some media analysts reckon it could be a lose-lose situation all round, as both parties risk naffing off consumers.

Viacom has said that although it’s still down with the idea of distributing clips online via YouTube, it’ll only do so via, “a fair and authorised distribution model.”