Six Pro-Viacom Amicus Briefs Filed in the 2nd Appeal in Viacom v. YouTube - Yup. Hollywood Still Wants to Control the Internet

There aren't as many amicus briefs in this second Viacom appeal as there were in the first, less than half, but there are six die-hards supporting Viacom's second appeal who have just filed their amicus briefs in Viacom v. YouTube-Google. They don't understand the Internet. They hate the DMCA's Safe Harbor provision, and they have learned absolutely nothing from history or from the rulings in this case so far. For example, here's the Copyright Alliance cynically predicting the end of the world if the appeals court doesn't overturn the district court judge's ruling for YouTube:

If the court upholds this decision, the burden of ensuring a safe and legal Internet ecosystem will shift almost exclusively onto the shoulders of authors, practically absolving other stakeholders from being in any way responsible for the activities that occur on their websites.

That is, I'm sorry to say, not true. There is no shifting *on* to the shoulders of authors, because the Safe Harbor provision in the DMCA *already* puts responsibility on authors to identify their own works if they think they are being infringed. That's what cease and desist letters are for. And after you send one, the entity you sent it to has responsibilities indeed, a responsibility to act. The only shifting in this picture is folks like the Copyright Alliance trying to shift that burden of identifying infringement onto Google instead. Because Google has lots of money, right? They're smart, right? Why can't they have to come up with something that won't cost authors anything or make them lift a finger to protect their own works?

This group has learned nothing at all about the Internet. All they want is that they want it to stop being the way it is. The Internet is allegedly killing them. The DMCA is giving YouTube a free ride, to hear them tell it, and the lower court judge, they argue, misinterpreted it. Back in the '80s, it was Sony allegedly destroying copyright with their wicked anti-copyright VCRs that let home users video films and tv shows. Now it's the Internet and Google and YouTube allegedly stealing money out of the mouths of starving artists. The arguments are the same.

But do they suffer from amnesia? One amicus brief states clearly that the majority of money Hollywood makes from movies is from sales of things like DVDs after the theater release. The very thing they told the court back in the days of the Sony Betamax case would destroy them turned out to be what kept them in business. They lacked vision back then, and they still do. But can't they compare and notice how wrong they were back then and extrapolate?

It's actually worse. It's greed. They want to make the Internet the new goldmine, as you can see in this telling quote from the amicus brief [PDF] by the American Federation of Musicians et al:

The motion picture and television industry's financial models and well-being, and that of the employees represented by the Guilds and Unions, heavily rely on "downstream" revenue, or revenue from the exploitation of its products subsequent to the theatrical release or first television run.5This was never truer than it is today - 75% of a typical motion picture's revenues derive from exploitation after the initial theatrical release, as do more than 50% of a television program's revenues after the initial television run. Internet exhibition and distribution, in particular, is one area of potential downstream revenue that is continuing to develop, evolve and expand as technology advances.

They want their business model to stay the same and just squeeze the Internet into it until it screams and dies, morphed into a money machine for them, while you and I can do without the real Internet, because it's too free-wheeling for their business model. What do they care about technical progress? This is about money, honey. If every other use of the Internet dies because of their bull-in-a-china-shop ways, what do they care? They never grokked the Internet anyhow.