Drew B broke the story yesterday (via Twitter) that the US media giant, Viacom, is suing YouTube for $1bn for breach of copyright... no, hang on; make that "massive international copyright infringement". Viacom claims that there are at least 160,000 clips of its programmes such as The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and Spongebob Squarepants on You Tube.
A similar story (free registration required) caught my eye in last week's edition of NMA. According to the magazine, heads of online content for UK football teams Liverpool, Manchester United and Arsenal have announced that UGC's threat to copyright is so great they will be steering clear of content sharing sites like You Tube until they are happy the sites are doing their utmost to protect copyright.
The comments were probably prompted by Chelsea's recent branding of a You Tube page to facilitate and provide Chelsea related content. The response by a Chelsea spokesperson to the article was that they have had to take on extra staff to cope with demand since setting up the page.
When will big brands start to appreciate that You Tube is your friend. Making your content available via sites like You Tube and MySpace can help push it out to an audience who may never have seen your shows before. Look at the research done by CBS from late last year.
Not only that, but as consumers like - no, love - the ability to sample music and TV before buying, brands that prevent people from doing so by removing copyrighted content will only shoot themselves in the foot in the long-term.
MEMO to big brands: You Tube is your friend.
Benvie broke the story? I think you'll find it was on the BBC long before Mr B passed it on to twitter.
Rumours of outraged blonde girls who pointed out the story to Mr B, are not entirely unfounded...
;-)
Posted by: Alex Pullin | March 14, 2007 at 05:11 PM
Just goes to show how easy it is for us to become Twitter-centric!
Posted by: Simon Collister | March 15, 2007 at 12:01 PM
Viacom and the Oscars are really missing a trick with Youtube. If they were to set up an official channel and select their own clips to display, they would have instant feedback on their consumer's opinions, dialogue with them, and a created portal to link them to paid-for content... Fools
Posted by: Ren | March 20, 2007 at 08:48 AM