Viacom has issued a take-down-notice to a YouTube user for posting a clip of one of their TV shows that included footage from one of his other YouTube videos that they had used without his permission.

What? A big-media company stealing and being hypocritical? Say it ‘aint so!

Apparently, it is. From the horses mouth:

“So Viacom took a video that I had made for non-profit purposes and without trying to acquire my permission, used it in a for-profit broadcast. And then when I made a YouTube clip of what they did with my material, they charged me with copyright infringement and had YouTube pull the clip,” wrote Knight in a new blog posting. “Folks, this is, as we say down here in the south, ‘bass-ackwards.’”

Ars has the details.

Personally, I’d like to see Viacom screwed for this. Not because I think what they did (in using the video) was particularly evil, but to highlight the rank hypocrisy of the big-media companies, and to show how out-there their legal policies really are. Here’s what I’d do; look at all of the copyright infringement suits they’ve been involved in in the past ten years, and find the most outrageous case of claimed damages you can. Then look at the annual income of the defendant in that case, and figure out what you’d need to multiply that income by to get the damages claimed. Next multiply Viacom’s annual revenue by that same amount and apply that as a fine, with the funds going to settle any outstanding copyright violation cases, and offer financial aid to people who’ve been ruined by over-the-top MPAA/RIAA copyright cases.

Legal? No. Fair? Possibly not, but something has to be done to send a clear message to big-media that they do not own us.

On the subject (sort-of) of whether the recording industry can continue to gouge people for money, Ars Technica is reporting that, after three years off the net, Suprnova has been relaunched by The PirateBay. Not content with relaunching an iconic torrent tracker, they also released the following statement:

This is how it works. Whatever you sink, we build back up. Whomever you sue, ten new pirates are recruited. Wherever you go, we are already ahead of you. You are the past and the forgotten, we are the internet and the future.

While I’m glad to see an old favourite return to the web, I’m not sure I really buy into this “pirates vs, content providers” thing. Copyright infringement is a fact of life, and it’s never going to go away, but it’s not some noble life goal, and people should never be proud of “sticking it to the man” by not paying for things they like, unless they really want to see the people who produce those things they like going out of business. It’s a big deal at the moment, because a large part of the media people consume is overpriced, and the monopolies that control the markets are trying hard to hang on to those margins in a world where content reproduction and distribution has suddenly become very much easier. In that sense you could see piracy as a temporary necessary evil until the content producers wake up to the fact that they can’t keep doing business the same way they did before the internet came along, and start pricing things realistically. I guess the above statement could be helpful in hammering that point home to the monopolists, but we should be careful that we don’t start to actually believe that we should never have to pay for access to any content regardless of what the creator thinks, because if we ever actually achieved that, we’d soon find that there wasn’t any more content to get for free.

Looks like Sony are up to their old tricks again. This time they’ve quietly started putting a new copy protection scheme on their DVDs that renders them unplayable on some DVD players (including Sony’s own.)

This is just typical of the whole movie/music industry; it has no impact at all on actual pirates - a quick web search reveals torrents purporting to be DVD-rips of the movies concerned, but massively inconveniences their paying customers. I really do wonder how much longer the paying public is going to put up with this before just telling companies like Sony exactly where to stick their root-kits, incompatible disks, and assume-the-customers-are-criminals-mentality.