Viacom

Published April 3, 2007

By Max C. Bookman

It’s 9am, Tuesday morning and my phone alarm is blaring “ What You Know About That.” I fumble for my glasses before dragging my tired ass over to the computer for the necessary pre-class Facebook check, a quick glance at the CNN.com headlines, and then to YouTube to get one more look at that hilarious video we discovered last night amid bong rips (turns out it’s not so funny after all).
The Internet is integral in not just my Tuesday mornings, but in all of our collegiate lives. What’s life without Google, YouTube, Wikipedia, or Limewire?
Viacom, the owner of MTV and Paramount, wants to help us find out. Viacom is claiming billions of dollars in losses for copyrighted material that appears on YouTube, which is owned by Google.
Viacom is making a huge mistake and misjudging our generation.
We want free shit, and we want it right now. “Well, obviously,” you say. Everyone likes free shit…especially right now. But the internet makes us special because we’re the first generation that can get it. And we do.
We’re not down with going to the record store to shell out for a bad CD with one dope song on it. We don’t want to walk outside and pay a dollar for The New York Times when CNN.com is one click away and free. We’re not even down with rushing home at 10:00 to catch Lost on ABC when we can see it online the next day commercial-free.
While we may be pretty stoked about the future of the free-and-now internet, powerful corporations like Viacom have been losing money while we watch Jon Stewart ad-free.
While Viacom may be on sound legal footing, they do not hold the moral high ground among the internet generation. We don’t see anything wrong with checking out last night’s Colbert on YouTube. But because that doesn’t make Viacom any money, they call it copyright infringement, which translates into big lawsuit cash.
The result of Viacom v. Google should set the precedent that companies don’t deserve money when their media shows up on the internet. A progressive verdict would forge a new understanding of what really deserves to get paid for, and how extensively companies can use their copyrights to make us pay.
We are the ones who made the internet what it is today, so we, not Viacom or any other big company, should dictate its future. So let’s go download, tag, burn, label, and do all that other stuff we do. Fighting the Man has never been so easy.

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