VIACOM: DO AS WE SAY, NOT AS WE DO

[defrog]

ITEM: In the opening round of the Viacom/YouTube lawsuit (in which Viacom is suing YouTube for encouraging people to steal Viacom’s content), YouTube’s legal team let loose the following interesting fact:

Viacom has been secretly using YouTube for years and disguising videos to make them look pirated.

[Viacom] 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.

To which I can only say:

Damn, Viacom. That’s really f***ed up.

Developing ...

Yr playing yrself,

This is dF