I cannot better my friend Sarah's precis and I apologize for taking much of her post
Earlier..I talked about the laws that media companies want passed, on account of how unchecked Internet piracy is destroying their businesses and they'll go bankrupt if the governments don't protect them! Imagine how embarrassing it would be if it turned out that one of these media companies had been deliberately making "roughened up" versions of their intellectual property, making it look like bootleg copies, and uploading it to YouTube for years, and demanding its removal. I don't know about you, but if I was caught with my pants that firmly entrenched round my ankles, I'd want to crawl into a hole and die.
Imagine how embarrassing it would be if it turned out that one of these media companies had been deliberately making "roughened up" versions of their intellectual property, making it look like bootleg copies, and uploading it to YouTube for years, and demanding its removal. I don't know about you, but if I was caught with my pants that firmly entrenched round my ankles, I'd want to crawl into a hole and die.
For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site. It deliberately "roughed up" the videos to make them look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube accounts using phony email addresses. It even sent employees to Kinko's to upload clips from computers that couldn't be traced to Viacom. And in an effort to promote its own shows, as a matter of company policy Viacom routinely left up clips from shows that had been uploaded to YouTube by ordinary users. Executives as high up as the president of Comedy Central and the head of MTV Networks felt "very strongly" that clips from shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report should remain on YouTube.Viacom's efforts to disguise its promotional use of YouTube worked so well that even its own employees could not keep track of everything it was posting or leaving up on the site. As a result, on countless occasions Viacom demanded the removal of clips that it had uploaded to YouTube, only to return later to sheepishly ask for their reinstatement. In fact, some of the very clips that Viacom is suing us over were actually uploaded by Viacom itself.
