This is an interesting article from Clive Thompson in New York magazine that frames the billion dollar Viacom/YouTube copyright lawsuit in terms of a culture clash between institutions of new and old media. Thompson argues that Google (owner of YouTube) follows a “meritocratic nerd logic” that fundamentally contradicts Big Media’s traditional m.o. that relies on dog-eat-dog competition for ad revenue, acquisitions, and extreme copyright protection.
I think Thompson over simplifies some things, like the “pure” logic behind Google search results, but the overall approach of the article really speaks to the way digital media challenges certain conventions of how businesses operate. His prediction at the end of the piece seems astute as well.
Yet despite the culture clash, the odds are strong that Viacom’s case will never get to court. It is more likely a tactic designed merely to drive Google to abandon its high-minded talk about a win-win future and cough up real money for rights. This will probably work, because neither wants to risk a legal precedent that screws its business. Both Google and Viacom might actually benefit from keeping the legality of YouTube fuzzy and letting their negotiators hammer out a truce. They’ll learn to live together. But they’ll never understand each other.
Big Media is used to throwing its collective weight around to establish at least somewhat clear delineations between winners and losers, between content they own (and completely control) and content that belongs to someone else. Clearly this is much harder these days, but it can still be done (Napster anyone?). The trade-off now is that new media is a little less “new,” a lot richer, and a whole lot more pervasive. When YouTube gets a hundred million video views a day, do you really want to yank your content?
