viacom

As their case grinds away in the courts, Google and Viacom continue to take shots at each other.

Google's announcement that it has paid $125 million to settle two copyright lawsuits brought by book publishers and authors is welcome news to Viacom and other copyright owners. Viacom, the behemoth entertainment company that filed a $1 billion copyright lawsuit against Google and YouTube last year, took the opportunity to compare the book publishers' case with its own.

"Copyright laws provide creators with the incentive to create the works consumers crave," Viacom said in a statement Tuesday. "It … Read more

It seems like the only complaint that the cranky digital-media press can come up with for MTVMusic.com, the legendary pop-culture brand's new music video hub, is, "Why wasn't this here years ago?"

Yeah, yeah, we know. There are licensing issues, especially for all those campy '80s videos that haven't seen the light of day in years. And launching a product prematurely could have led to bad press, as opposed to the "wow, we like this" response that MTV Music seems to have gotten thus far.

The issue, of course, is that most … Read more

Saturday Night Live helped make YouTube famous, and Tina Fey's recent appearances have led to big traffic spikes at NBC.com and Hulu.

So why shouldn't the long-running TV show have its own Web site?

Seth Meyers spilled the beans last week on an ESPN podcast that SNL was in talks to build a site that would feature clips of show sketches, including material never before aired.

A move like this makes sense. Viacom has built branded sites around its most popular shows, such as The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. The idea is to build Web … Read more

Over the weekend, Larry Lessig penned a cogent argument for a common-sense reading of copyright law. The problem, he writes, is that in our attempts to quash peer-to-peer file-sharing (stealing), we're wreaking a huge amount of collateral damage on those that remix content.

In other words, all piracy is not created equal. Some, like the remixers, should be protected by US Fair Use doctrine:

We are in the middle of something of a war here -- what some call "the copyright wars"; what the late Jack Valenti called his own "terrorist war," where the "… Read more

Once the global leader in youth culture, MTV's attempts to address the social-networking craze have seemed a little puzzling sometimes (the Twittering Moon Man?) But now we've seen another piece of the entertainment brand's puzzle: Backchannel, a play-while-you watch game that's one part chat room, one part Digg, and one part Mystery Science Theater with a Mean Girls twist.

It's debuting on Monday night with that evening's episode of wildly popular reality-soap The Hills.

Here's how Backchannel works: Watch the show (for now, only The Hills is on Backchannel, but later this fall … Read more

Victor Rook, an indy filmmaker who was once wrongly accused by Viacom of copyright violations, is happy a judge has reminded media companies to think twice before calling someone a pirate.

In February 2007, Viacom demanded that YouTube remove Rook's documentary about a professional wrestler, accusing him of using some of the company's copyright material. The conglomerate was mistaken. None of the video or music Rook included in his film belonged to Viacom. Executives at the company apologized but the filmmaker still had to wait three weeks before the clip was reposted to YouTube, which he says hurt … Read more

An unlikely drama is playing out in, of all places, the security research field. Researcher Dan Kaminsky says that earlier this year, he discovered a serious flaw in the Domain Name System that drives the Internet. He's spent the last few months coordinating a huge project to get the flaw patched by all necessary companies before disclosing details about the flaw. But now a fellow researcher has taken a public guess at what the flaw was. And whether he's right or not, Kaminsky is warning companies to patch their software immediately. Reporter Robert Vamosi joins me in the … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman doesn't typically bash Google in the press.

While Google CEO Eric Schmidt has publicly ridiculed Viacom for filing a $1 billion copyright claim against Google and YouTube, Dauman is usually more reserved.

But at a small press gathering Monday night in San Francisco, Dauman discussed some of the events that led up to the lawsuit and what he sees as wrong with Google's handling of the entertainment industry. (I wasn't taking direct notes, so I'll paraphrase most of what he said.)

First, Dauman noted that one of the first meetings he … Read more

Google CEO Eric Schmidt has spoken more than once this year about monetizing YouTube, but he showed some signs of patience on Thursday for finding a new, good way to sell ads on the video-sharing site. And when Google gets the mechanism right, Schmidt said he expects to hit the mother lode.

"There will be new monetization forms. That is what we are seeking. That is the holy grail," he said on a conference call after Google reported disappointing second-quarter earnings. "When we find it, it (monetization) is likely to be very large because of the scope … Read more