flamewars, executive-style

Those assholes at Viacom are calling Google assholes. LOLZ at 11.

From the article:

Viacom quotes YouTube employee Maryrose Dunton telling an engineer to "'forget about the email alerts stuff' precisely because 'I hate making it easier for these a-holes' - referring to copyright owners - and 'we’re just trying to cover our asses so we don’t get sued.'"
Viacom complains that YouTube employees "sneered at rights holders as 'copyright bastards' and 'a-holes.'"
Google retorts that Viacom can't complain about this language, and it quotes numerous Viacom execs to make its point. Sample outbursts include, "fuck you, you Google bastards," "bastards at Google are harassing me," and the eloquent "fuck those mother fuckers."
A Viacom VP even complained about the "fucking assholes" at YouTube—because the company "enforced its repeat-infringer policy concerning a Viacom marketing account that had received multiple take-down notices from Viacom's legal department." The lulz, they are here in spades.
Viacom top brass wrote e-mails with more exclamation points than my niece would even consider decent. They also had what Google calls an "obsession" with buying YouTube.
Case in point: "I WANT TO OWN YOUTUBE. I think it's critical, and if it goes to a competitor.....!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" That was from MTV Networks head Judy McGrath.
Viacom CEO Tom Freston wrote, "If we get UTube… I wanna run it." McGrath responded, "You'll have to kill me to get to it first."

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platedlizard
2010-05-23 04:27 am UTC (link)

I should point out that those videos are only a small portion of the videos that Viacom is suing over, the majority were, in fact, copyright violations. The main issue of the lawsuit is that Viacom feels that the original developers of Youtube made a killing off of their content (they were paid something like 300 million each when they sold Youtube, not bad at all). Apparently at least one of the founders was doing stuff like uploading swiped content early on to generate views. So Viacom and other companies might have reason to be pissed.

But! In 2005 Viacom tried to buy Youtube. Then, when Google expressed interest in it, they offered to co-own it with Google. It wasn't until after Google out-bid them did they get all lawsuity. Sour grapes taste nasty after all.

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	cmdr_zoom 2010-05-23 05:48 pm UTC (link)
	oh boy do they. As does the whine pressed from them. (Reply to this)(Parent)

tachikoma01
2010-05-28 09:05 pm UTC (link)

Wait, isn't/wasn't Viacom trying to create their 'own' version of Youtube?

Except they didn't plan to allow any of the user-generated content that made youtube so popular in the first place, only their own corporate-approval stamped content?

I think they're winning some kind of aware for "The internets: Not getting it" right now.

... If I got ahold of a used dump truck, painted it yellow with the words 'THE INTERNETS' on it and drove it past the Viacom office, do you think they'd run after it?

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	platedlizard 2010-05-28 09:19 pm UTC (link)
	I had not heard that one, the lulz keep coming! I'm not sure how that would work, Youtube is nothing but user-generated content. I mean, there are many companies that post episodes and clips and what not, but they are not like Youtube. YouTube without the 'you' is just a tube. Which I hear you can dump things down and sometimes they get jammed. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	mcity 2010-06-02 03:48 pm UTC (link)
	If only they used some sort of truck. (Reply to this)(Parent)

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