In Viacom v. Google, ignorance is not bliss
This marketplace suffers from a dearth of data. Viacom's lawsuit against Google is a direct result of this acute lack of real numbers.
For example, nobody knows:
- How many copyrighted works are hosted on YouTube, not even, apparently, YouTube or Google.
- How long those works are.
- How much those works are worth. As buddy Liz Gannes points out, the DMCA provides $150,000 in damages per work per infringement. Multiply that by 160,000 Viacom videos and you get $24 billion. Viacom's 2006 revenues were $11.5 billion.
- Whether those works constitute fair use.
- Whether there is a large amount of private videos on YouTube that copyright owners can't even see.
- What YouTube is actually worth. $1.7 billion is based on ad revenue forecasts and market protection measures. Their purchasing valuation has nothing to do with the content because, well, nobody seems to know what's really on the site. Not even Google.
- How much promotional value -- in real dollars -- a media company receives from YouTube. Despite the suggestion by both CBS and ABC that online viewing increases offline viewership, I've seen few numbers showing exactly how much that promotion is worth. It's not that I don't believe in the promotional value -- I very much do -- but gut instinct does not a marketing budget make.
So I guess we can all take a page from Donald Rumsfeld's playbook: You sue with the knowledge you have, not the knowledge you wish you had. And in this case, that's exactly the point.
