Hollywood and Bollywood join arms to fight piracy (tech)
MUMBAI, India – Hollywood and Bollywood linked arms Thursday to fight piracy, with the announcement of a coalition among the Motion Picture Association of America and seven Indian companies to tackle counterfeiting in one of the world’s largest film markets . The alliance comes as Hollywood tries to tap global markets more aggressively and as Indian movie studios grow in size and stature — narrowing the gap between Indian and U.S. filmmakers, who have not always seen eye-to-eye on intellectual property issues . A year in the making, the coalition to fight film piracy in India will work with movie theaters to crack down on camcorder piracy — the source of 90 percent of all pirated DVDs — with police to tighten enforcement, with Internet service providers to fight Internet piracy and with politicians to create more effective laws. MPAA, which has similar anti-piracy alliances in the U.S., Europe and Hong Kong, would not disclose the size of the coalition’s budget but said funding would come from members. The Indian film industry has a rich history of copycat productions and traditionally has had less respect for the sanctity of intellectual property than Hollywood would like. In 2008, for example, Warner Bros . unsuccessfully sued to block the release of an Indian Punjabi film called “Hari Puttar — A Comedy of Terrors” on the grounds that the name was too close to its Harry Potter series. That friction has started to ease with the rise of corporate studios in India , like UTV Motion Pictures and Reliance Big Pictures, which last year took a 50 percent share in Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks for $325 million. Over the last two years, a growing number of successful partnerships — like ” My Name is Khan ,” produced by two Indian companies and distributed by Fox in India and the U.S. — as well as successful crossover movies — like ” Slumdog Millionaire ” and “Avatar,” which both did well in India — have also strengthened ties. “People are becoming more of the same mind,” Dan Glickman , the outgoing chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America , told The Associated Press in an interview. “The Indian film industry now understands their product is getting stolen at significant rates.” Piracy cost India’s $2.3 billion film industry $959 million and 571,000 jobs in 2008, according to an Ernst & Young study, and pirated DVDs account for 60 percent of the market, according to KPMG. “Piracy is one of the most pernicious problems facing the entertainment industry, and the Indian industry in particular,” said Reliance Big Pictures chief executive Sanjeev Lamba. Lamba attributed part of the financial success of ” 3 Idiots ,” distributed by Reliance Big Pictures last year, to the studio’s aggressive anti-piracy efforts. Round-the-clock work helped prevent 10 million illegal downloads, he said, adding that at one point his staff was finding new illegal digital copies of the film on the Internet every five minutes. Piracy has gotten worse in India as Internet connection speeds have improved and DVD player usage has increased. In the last two years, the number of Indian households with DVD players surged from 4 million to 45 million, said Harish Dayani, chief executive of India’s Moser Baer , the world’s second-largest CD and DVD manufacturer. He estimates that Indian consumers snap up 700 million illegal DVDs every year, giving them little incentive to go to theaters and generating 15 billion rupees ($330 million) for counterfeiters. Reducing that leakage is crucial for Hollywood studios as they try to push into India. “More and more, the growth of film is outside the U.S.,” Glickman said. “Hollywood is now looking at the world as their marketplace.” KPMG expects Indian film industry revenues to hit 136.7 billion rupees ($3 billion) by 2014, an average annual growth of 8.9 percent. “This is a country of 1 billion people who love movies more than anywhere else in the world,” Glickman said. “We’d be foolish not to want to come into this market.”
Viacom, YouTube air dirty laundry in legal battle (tech)
SAN FRANCISCO – Viacom Inc . and Google Inc. ’s YouTube site began airing each other’s dirty laundry Thursday, providing a tantalizing peek at the wheeling and dealing that triggered a bitter battle over the copyright laws governing the Internet. The previously confidential information came out as part of the evidence in a copyright lawsuit that Viacom filed against YouTube in 2007 for alleged copyright infringement of “The Colbert Report,” “The Daily Show” and other shows. The sensitive documents were unsealed because Viacom and YouTube are both trying to persuade U.S. District Judge Louis Stanton to decide the case without a trial. Both YouTube and Viacom are getting muddied in the process. Internal YouTube e-mails depict at least one of the company’s founders as a video pirate and suggest the Web site’s employees were more interested in getting rich quick than adhering to copyright laws. Other records show Viacom wanted to buy YouTube at least seven months before it filed its lawsuit and often used the Web site to promote the shows on its cable TV programming. Google bought YouTube for $1.76 billion in November 2006, but not before Viacom made a last-ditch effort to persuade Google to team up in a joint bid for the Web’s leading video site, according to the court documents. A few months later, Google offered to pay Viacom $590 million for licensing rights to video, according to the records. Viacom, the owner of Paramount Pictures and cable TV channels that include Comedy Central, instead sued Google and YouTube in a complaint seeking more than $ 1 billion in damages. The media company alleges that YouTube allowed copyright-protected clips to appear on its Web site in its early days to attract a bigger audience. YouTube maintains it has always obeyed online copyright laws, which generally protect service providers from copyright claims as long as they didn’t post the infringing material themselves and promptly remove it when notified about a violation. But an e-mail exchange among YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley , Steve Chen and Jawed Karim showed there were in-house copyright abuses. “Jawed, please stop putting stolen videos on the site,” Chen wrote in the July 19, 2005, e-mail. “We’re going to have a tough time defending the fact that we’re not liable for the copyrighted material on the site because we didn’t put it up when one of the co-founders is blatantly stealing content from other sites and trying to get everyone to see it.” In a statement after the documents were unsealed, YouTube said Chen’s e-mail was referring to some aviation videos that had been making the rounds on the Web. “The exchange has nothing to do with supposed piracy of media content,” YouTube said. Karim left YouTube before Google bought it in 2006. But he kept YouTube e-mail on his personal computer, enabling Viacom to obtain correspondence that Hurley had said he lost, according to court documents. In a July 29, 2005 e-mail, Chen advised Hurley and Karim to “steal it!” in an apparent reference to an unidentified video clip, according to the court documents. After Hurley asked if he wanted to steal movies, Chen replied, “haha ya. Or something.” Hurley, though, brushed off the suggestion, saying he had bigger ambitions than other sites that depended unauthorized video for traffic. “I would like to build something more valuable and more useful … actually build something that people will talk about and changes the way people use video on the Internet,” Hurley wrote. YouTube was still in a testing, or “beta,” phase at the time Chen and Hurley wrote their e-mails. The site didn’t drop the beta tag until December 2005 when the YouTube was processing about 6,000 video clips per day. It now accepts about 24 hours of video per minute and hosts more than 500 million videos, according to the court documents. Google had its own copyright reservations about YouTube before it struck a deal. Internal documents obtained by Viacom quote Google executives describing YouTube as “a ‘rogue enabler’ of content theft” and warning the site “is completely sustained by pirated content.” Viacom was sizing up YouTube as a takeover target before it launched its legal attack against YouTube. MTV Networks , the division overseeing Viacom’s cable TV operations , made the case for a YouTube bid in a July 2006 presentation. “We believe YouTube would make a transformative acquisition for MTV Networks/Viacom that would immediately make us the leading deliverer of video online,” Viacom’s review said. Viacom also hailed YouTube as “the dominant platform” for Web video and worried that the site would end up being sold to News Corp.’s MySpace . The documents didn’t mention how much Viacom might have been willing to pay for YouTube. The presentation was drawn up by Adam Cahan, an MTV Networks executive vice president. Cahan had left Google earlier in 2006 to work for Viacom. Just a few days before Google announced its YouTube deal, Cahan tried to persuade his old employer to make a joint bid. “The idea would be: Viacom and Google buy YouTube,” Cahan wrote in an Oct. 6, 2006, e-mail to Susan Wojcicki, Google’s vice president of product management and the sister-in-law of Google co-founder Sergey Brin . After Google announced it had struck a deal with YouTube on its own, Viacom employees continued to post a “boatload” of clips to the video site, according to a Viacom e-mail released Thursday. Since Google’s takeover, YouTube has struck licensing deals with many media companies, which now get a cut of revenue from ads shown on the video site. YouTube won over much of the professional media by developing technology that automatically detects video and audio claimed by its copyright owners. It worked with another Silicon Valley firm, Audible Magic, on the audio detection.
Google adword win in Europe wouldn’t end battles (tech)
SAN FRANCISCO/LONDON () – Google Inc ( GOOG .O) could win a widely expected victory next week in Europe ’s top court and still face many more battles over keyword advertising, the backbone of its Internet business model. The European Court of Justice in Luxembourg will rule on Tuesday whether or not Google infringes the trademark rights of such companies as Louis Vuitton through its Adwords service, in which advertisers pay to use keywords that are the companies’ proprietary brand names . In Google’s Adwords service, advertisers pay a fee so that “sponsored links” to their own websites pop up beside a user’s keyword search results. “This case has the potential to shape global standards for the legitimacy of keyword advertising,” said Eric Goldman, an associate professor of law at Santa Clara University School of Law , who called that a “multibillion-dollar question.” “We’re going to get new and highly influential legal guidance on the legitimacy of that practice,” he said. “That has the potential to move billions of dollars in our industry.” Brand owners will closely examine next week’s judgment on three cases, one of which was brought by Louis Vuitton ( LVMH.PA ), as they try to protect their trademarks against a practice they say undermines their cachet. Buying a sponsored link on a keyword such as “Nike” can be useful for retailers who stock goods of that brand — yet the retailers do not pay Nike ( NKE .N) for using the brand name. More controversially, Nike’s rivals might buy it as a keyword, hoping to divert trade and traffic to themselves. At the extreme, brands like Louis Vuitton and others fear that a loss of control of their brands to less-than-desirable outfits — such as counterfeiters — would damage painstakingly managed reputations or confuse and drive away consumers. NO CLEAN WIN The case is the first at such a high level to test Google’s liability, rather than that of the advertisers buying keywords. Google used to block advertisers from buying others’ brand names as keywords, but in 2004 it changed its policy in North America and four years later extended that to Britain and Ireland . Google says it will honor valid complaints from brand owners and prevent their rivals from using a trademarked keyword in their ad text, but some trademark holders say they should not be sold in the first place. The stakes are high in this murky area of law because paid ads are a mainstay of Google’s business and a foundation of commerce in the digital age. Courts in various member states within the European Union have issued disparate rulings, and U.S. decisions are similarly inconsistent. Although Google does not break out revenue from its paid ads, it derives 97 percent of its annual revenue of nearly $24 billion from advertising. Cases from five European nations brought by brand owners against advertisers are also pending in the European Court of Justice . The first of those will also be decided next week. In one of those cases, international flower delivery group Interflora Inc and its UK unit are suing British retailer Marks & Spencer (MKS.L) for using the keyword “Interflora” and variants to trigger ads for itself, in the hope of luring flower buyers to its own service. Interflora says its bidding costs for its own name as a keyword leapt as much as 14-fold when Google changed its policy in Britain in 2008, increasing its costs by a total of $750,000 in the first year after the change. In the Google case, experts believe the court will rule at least partly in the Web giant’s favor, based on the September nonbinding opinion of the court’s Advocate General that Google did not infringe brand owners’ rights by allowing advertisers to buy keywords corresponding to trademarks. But the case, which originated in the French courts, is unlikely to completely absolve Google of future responsibility, with further litigation in European countries guaranteed. “It’s my feeling Google is going to win, but it’s not going to be an ultimate victory for Google,” said Alex Montagu, a New York-based attorney who specializes in intellectual property and international commerce transactions. Though the hot-button issue of counterfeiting was not in front of the court, brand owners could still find Google liable in their host countries for “secondary infringement” by selling keywords to those who then infringe the trademark, such as counterfeiters. “Where Google is not out of the woods is if Louis Vuitton can demonstrate that those sponsored links are being sold to people not authorized to use those trademarks, such as counterfeiters or the grey goods market,” said Montagu. He argues for an international convention to deal with the liability of Internet service providers, saying trademark law has not kept pace with the digital age. EBay Inc ( EBAY .O), which buys keywords from Google and also operates its own internal search, has similarly been sued by brand owners, including Louis Vuitton, in Europe and the United States over its use of keywords. A favorable ruling for Google in Europe’s top court could allow eBay to reargue cases it has lost in countries such as France considered sympathetic to the claims of brand owners. Google currently faces eight cases alone in the United States over the sale of trademarked keywords, said Goldman. A “nice, clean” ruling from the European Court of Justice could potentially influence U.S. law, said Goldman, who added: “It’s very possible we’ll get a very muddy, murky ruling.” “We take it for granted that Google can do whatever it’s doing and that’s not a question that anyone here (in the U.S.) has ever answered definitively.” (Additional reporting by Foo Yun Chee in Brussels; Editing by Gary Hill)
Jamie Foxx to star in "Kane & Lynch" (tech)
LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) – Jamie Foxx is in negotiations to star opposite Bruce Willis in “Kane & Lynch,” a video-game adaptation that veteran stunt coordinator and second unit director Simon Crane is helming. Nu Image/Millenium is in talks to finance and produce, with Lions Gate distributing. Foxx has been circling the project for a few weeks, but word leaked Wednesday night when screenwriter Kyle Ward, who wrote the adaptation, tweeted Foxx’s involvement. The story follows Kane (Willis), a death row inmate who, along with a schizophrenic killer named Lynch (Foxx), is sprung by Kane’s former team so that he can retrieve a stolen fortune. The game was developed by IO Interactive and published by Eidor Interactive.
Producer files $30M suit against Lady Gaga in NYC (tech)
NEW YORK – A songwriter and music producer who claims he helped launch pop star Lady Gaga says she squeezed him out of her lucrative career after he co-wrote some of her songs, came up with her stage name and helped get her record deal. Rob Fusari filed a $30.5 million lawsuit against the Grammy Award -winning performer, saying his protege and former girlfriend ditched him as her career soared. “All business is personal,” said the lawsuit, filed Wednesday in a Manhattan state court. Lady Gaga’s spokesman, Dave Tomberlin, didn’t immediately respond to an e-mail sent Thursday by The Associated Press. Fusari had credits on such hits as Will Smith ’s “Wild, Wild West” and Destiny’s Child ’s ” Bootylicious ” when a friend steered the piano-playing singer — then known by her real name, Stefani Germanotta — to him in March 2006, according to his lawsuit. Though he initially dismissed her, he realized she had star potential after hearing her play in his Parsippany, New Jersey, studio, the suit said. He spent the next several months working with her every day and “radically reshaping her approach,” persuading her to drop rock riffs for dance beats, it said. As they co-wrote songs such as “Paparazzi” and “Beautiful, Dirty, Rich,” which would appear on her debut album , “The Fame,” he transformed Germanotta into Lady Gaga, a name adapted from Queen’s “Radio Ga Ga,” the lawsuit said. In a 2009 interview with the , Lady Gaga said her “realization of Gaga was five years ago, but Gaga’s always been who I am.” “I was Gaga from the time that I was 19 through my first record deal,” the 23-year-old said of her over-the-top, avant-garde style, which has captured the imaginations of millions of fans. “I always dressed like that before people knew me as Lady Gaga. I was always that way … I stuck out like a sore thumb.” According to the lawsuit, Lady Gaga and Fusari’s relationship turned romantic and then became a business partnership in May 2006, when they created a joint venture called Team Love Child LLC to promote her career. Fusari’s share was 20 percent, it said. Fusari — whose account of his role in the multiplatinum-selling artist’s early career has been told in interviews — says he introduced Lady Gaga to a record executive who ultimately shepherded her to Universal Music Group’s Interscope Records , which released “The Fame” in 2008. The album has sold more than 3 million copies in the United States; Fusari has a producing credit. But the lawsuit says their personal and business relationship had soured by then and he has been denied a 20 percent share of song royalties, 15 percent of merchandising revenue and other money he’s owed. He acknowledges getting checks for about $611,000 but says that isn’t his full share. Lady Gaga won two Grammys in January: best dance recording, for ” Poker Face ,” and best electronic/dance album, for “The Fame.” ___ Music Writer Nekesa Moody and Writer Mesfin Fekadu in New York contributed to this report.
Tech Equipment Tax Deduction Tips (tech)
Your computers, your cell phone, Internet services, Web hosting–your business depends on technology to run, so at tax time it’s natural to want to deduct all your tech expenditures. And accountants agree–but only up to a point. If you do your own taxes, even good tax-prep software (desktop or Web-based) can’t make all the decisions for you (although it should save you from serious math errors). We talked to some accountants about key issues to consider when filling out this year’s forms, as well as when planning for next year. Deduct Now or Later? PCs, printers, and other expensive tech hardware are considered assets that retain value over several years, but the IRS gives you a choice on how to deduct their costs. You can either depreciate them, meaning that you spread the deduction over the number of years the IRS considers to be the useful life of the item (this may not agree with your opinion), or you can write the entire cost off in one fell swoop as a Section 179 deduction . How you choose to proceed depends a lot on what you expect your income and other expenses to look like going forward. Did you have a big year, and do you want to lower your profits to minimize the tax bite? Go ahead and take those full Section 179 deductions. But remember, if you write everything off immediately, you will have less to deduct next year and the year after. Section 179 Is Being Downsized Most self-employed people won’t run into it, but there is a limit on dollar totals for Section 179 deductions, and it will be plunging in the next few years–something that Los Angeles -based CPA Jim Sharvin says could definitely impact larger small businesses. For the 2009 tax year (the one we’re doing returns for now), the limit is at its high of $250,000; for 2010 it drops to $134,000, and in 2011 it plummets to $25,000. Again, that shouldn’t be too much of a problem for self-employed individuals, but if you’re running an office with a dozen or so employees, you might not want to postpone computer upgrades to next year if you’re planning on taking Section 179 deductions. Be careful, by the way, when doing state returns. Most states aren’t as generous with their equivalent of Section 179 limits, so you may not be able to write off everything you deduct on your state return. Of course, you can still depreciate the purchase over several years, but you’ll need to calculate these deductions differently. Personal Versus Business Expenses It’s tempting, especially for self-employed individuals who work at home, to write off all computer and phone expenses, but the IRS won’t look kindly on you if you do. Dan Morris, a Silicon Valley-based CPA, says that in general, the smaller the business, the more the IRS is likely to question attempts to write off 100 percent of the costs of computers, cell phones, and other hardware that most people use for personal purposes at least part of the time. For example, if you own just one phone, the IRS won’t believe that you use it only for business–most people do make and/or receive personal calls from time to time. The solution is to demonstrate that you are spending at least some money on a phone for personal use. For example, If you have a cell phone and a landline, you might be able to write off all of the cell phone and part of the landline. Similarly, if you have four computers in your home and also have a spouse and kids, the IRS is not going to believe that all of those computers are exclusively used for business. Better to designate at least one or two for family use and not try to deduct them as business assets. Deducting Tech Toys A variation of this issue arises when you seek to deduct the costs of expensive gadgets that the IRS might view as perks or toys as opposed to necessary business tools (an iPad might be an example of this). Again, Morris says, “recognize that if you’re buying cutting-edge technology, superfast tech items, the smaller the business, the closer you are to having a personal benefit–and the more likely the IRS is to challenge the expense.” Morris says to ask yourself if the item meets the IRS’s standards for a legitimate deduction, which are that it should be a usual, necessary, customary, and reasonable expense for your type of business. A computer consultant, for example, might reasonably write off more high-end computer and smartphone purchases than, say, a machinist. Morris also recommends that small businesses consider creating a technology-purchase policy document. Written guidelines are useful if the IRS is questioning whether, for example, you replace laptops every year for business reasons or as a perk. What About Software? Although you might use software for longer than a year, accountants generally prefer that you list it as an office expense (unless it’s a huge elaborate system that has been specially developed for your firm). Most off-the-shelf software, such as antivirus programs, actually are based on annual subscriptions anyway. If you have a lot of hardware expenses anyway, you might run into the Section 179 limit, so you may want to treat more items as office expenses, which are deducted completely in the year that you purchase them. This goes for small hardware items like low-end cameras –some accountants will treat anything that costs less than $500 as an expense rather than an asset. ( TurboTax , by the way, will recommend that you treat any purchase of under $100 as an expense, regardless of how long you intend to use it.) Selling a Section 179 Asset If (like me) you tend to sell tech products on sites such as eBay after a year or so in order to finance the purchase of newer models, be aware that you should report whatever you get from the sale to the IRS, which will then “recapture” that part of the Section 179 deduction. In other words, you can’t deduct the full cost of something and then get part of that money back. However, if you just let old equipment fall into disuse, you don’t have to refund any of the Section 179 deduction. Internet Access and Web Hosting The IRS doesn’t much care how you categorize business expenses, so you can list Internet access as either an office expense or a utility (like a telephone). But again, if you work at home–especially if you have a spouse or kids who go online–you can’t expect to get away with deducting the full cost of your DSL or cable service as a business expense. As for Web hosting , you can certainly deduct the cost of a business site, either as advertising or an office expense or a miscellaneous expense. You should also deduct the cost of your mobile data plan, especially if you have landline Internet access. Employee Tech Expenses If you are a salaried employee with no income that isn’t reported on a W-2, but you incur unreimbursed work-related technology expenses–for example, a laptop on which you work from home, and some portion of your Internet access–you can itemize them (on form 2106 ) as employee business expenses. But because you can deduct only such expenses that exceed 2 percent of your household’s adjusted gross income, you’re much better off getting your employer to reimburse you for those expenses. The 2 percent you have to exceed just to start writing off your first dollar is money you’ll never recoup.
Google-Viacom lawsuit deal cloaks YouTube user identities (tech)
NEW YORK () – Court documents made public Thursday in a billion-dollar court battle between Viacom and Google accuse YouTube executives of posting stolen videos to rocket the startup to stardom. Viacom was also a target in filings with Google countering that the US entertainment giant foisted some of its own content onto YouTube’s online stage and even wanted to buy the firm. “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,” YouTube chief counsel Zahavah Levine said in a statement. “Given Viacom’s own actions, there is no way YouTube could ever have known which Viacom content was and was not authorized to be on the site.” Viacom responding by saying the documents made public by a federal district court in the state of New York show evidence and law backing its charge that YouTube “intentionally operated as a haven for massive copyright infringement .” Evidence cited in legal documents included internal YouTube emails indicating the video sharing website ’s founders and executives knew much of the content on the nascent service were copyrighted material. “Jawed, please stop putting stolen videos on the site,” Steve Chen is quoted as telling fellow YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim in an email dated in July of 2005. Viacom attorneys contended in legal filings that after YouTube was launched that year, the startup’s strategy was to achieve meteoric growth by whatever means necessary so it would become a prize acquisition target. YouTube was a year-old Internet sensation when Google bought it in a 1.65-billion-dollar stock deal in 2006. “Viacom’s brief misconstrues isolated lines from a handful of e-mails produced in this case to try to show that YouTube was founded with bad intentions ,” Levine said. Viacom tried repeatedly to buy YouTube before Google acquired the startup, according to Levine. The firm filed a billion-dollar copyright lawsuit against YouTube and Google two years ago. Viacom’s court filing charges that Google acts as a willing accomplice to Internet users who put clips of Viacom’s copyrighted television programs on the popular video-sharing website. The lawsuit has been merged with similar civil litigation being pursued by the English Premier League, which says soccer game clips are routinely posted on YouTube without authorization. Google shields itself with 1998’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act , US legislation that says Internet firms are not responsible for what users put on websites. The lawsuit highlights that copyright rules need to be updated for the Internet Age, according to computer and communications industry association president Ed Black. “It is a huge threat to the openness of the Internet,” Black said of the lawsuit. “A bad verdict in this one for conduct that is not horrendous would have an unbelievably chilling effect on all players in the Internet world.” The case essentially calls for YouTube and other websites to become “copyright police” for content owners. Meanwhile, the law could be interpreted to provide copyright protection to every Twitter text, blog post, Flickr photo and email, according to Black. “You’d need a huge army of censors to sort through this stuff and that is really not feasible or reasonable,” Black told . “What is being played with here is people are basically being told that your business would be destroyed unless you install some censorship. The Chinese government would love it; it is what they do with political content.”
Viacom, Google accuse other of YouTube hypocrisy (tech)
NEW YORK/SAN FRANCISCO () – Viacom Inc accused Google Inc of turning a blind eye to illegal video clips on its YouTube site in a bid to attract viewers, according to court documents released on Thursday. Google countered that Viacom managers continued to secretly upload content to YouTube even after the media company had filed the $ 1 billion copyright suit in March 2007. Viacom , which owns cable networks MTV and Comedy Central among others, charged that Google and YouTube executives were aware videos were being illegally uploaded to the site, failed to stop it, and, in some cases, broke the law by adding copyrighted clips themselves. “YouTube was intentionally built on infringement and there are countless internal YouTube communications demonstrating that YouTube’s founders and its employees intended to profit from that infringement,” Viacom said in a statement on Thursday, as the documents were released. As part of its evidence, Viacom provided excerpts from emails in 2005 between YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley , Steve Chen and Jawed Karim . YouTube is a division of Google. In a July 19, 2005 email, for instance, Chen wrote to Karim and copied in Hurley: “We’re going to have a tough time defending the fact that we’re not liable for the copyrighted material on the site because we didn’t put it up when one of the co-founders is blatantly stealing content from other sites and trying to get everyone to see it.” YouTube Chief Counsel Zahavah Levine, on a blog post, said Viacom’s brief “misconstrues isolated lines from a handful of emails.” The opening briefs in the Viacom vs YouTube lawsuit are widely seen as a test of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) which YouTube believes protects it from Viacom’s claims. The law criminalizes the production of technology to circumvent anti-piracy measures while limiting the liability of providers of online services for copyright infringement by their users. While it is still early in the legal battle, it appeared Google was trying to cast Viacom’s strategy as hypocritical by claiming several of the company’s own managers and agencies had continued to upload videos to YouTube. “Viacom routinely left up clips from shows that had been uploaded to YouTube by ordinary users,” said Levine in the blog post. “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,” Levine said. With YouTube being easily the most popular online video site, many TV producers upload clips of their shows for promotional purposes. YouTube said this week its users upload up to 24 hours of video every minute. Google also claimed Viacom had in 2006 expressed interest in buying YouTube, which the Web search leader subsequently bought months later for $1.65 billion. The case is In re: Viacom v. YouTube, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, No. 1:07-cv-02103 (LLS). (Reporting by Yinka Adegoke and Alexei Oreskovic in San Francisco; Editing by Paul Thomasch and Richard Chang)
Creditors get turned off by sex.com auction (tech)
NEW YORK () – An auction in New York of the hotly desired Sex.com Internet domain name scheduled for Thursday was halted at the last hour when creditors forced the previous owner into bankruptcy. Bidders in the auction were to have been required to show one million dollars just to participate. Three creditors filed a Chapter 11 bankruptcy petition against previous owners Escom in California bankruptcy court “to protect their interests and maximize value for all other creditors and equity holders,” said a statement from their attorneys Meister Seelig and Fein. “The filing will stay the public auction foreclosure proceedings previously scheduled for March 18, 2010, which petitioners believe would have diminished the value of Escom’s assets.” The domain had been due to be auctioned by an auctioneer for DOM Partners, a New Jersey lender that claimed ownership of sex.com after Escom went into default on a loan.
On the Call: Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein (tech)
Palm Inc . reported disappointing sales of its smart phones, which it revamped with a brand new operating system last year. CEO Jon Rubinstein , who came to Pal from Apple Inc ., where he spent a decade and was an important figure behind the brightly colored iMac computers and the iPod, discussed his confidence in Palm’s prospects on a conference call with analysts. He said the company is trying to boost sales by making sales people in stores more comfortable with its products. QUESTION: Is there anything in your past experience that gives you confidence based on … the activities you’re now focusing on, where you’ve seen similar products face “transitional challenges,” shall we say? RUBINSTEIN: I’ve had other examples in the past of where you brought a new product to market and it took while for people to understand it and get used to it. And then all of a sudden it takes off, and everyone rewrites history: “Oh yeah, it was really successful from Day One .” I think there’s some patience that needs to happen around this. While clearly we’re disappointed and frustrated that we’re not moving faster, I still think we’re doing all the right things and we need to keep doing them and stay on mission.
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