What will come of the Viacom v. YouTube suit?
UNDERDOG - Criminal/Drunk Driving Defense in Maryland, Virginia, DC:
Computer hard drive. (Image from Pacific Northwest Laboratory’s website).
Even my most well-heeled litigation clients set a ceiling on the money they are willing to spend for litigation fees and expenses. One thing that interests me in the pending Viacom, et al. v. YouTube, et al. (S.D.N.Y. 1:07-cv-02103) copyright infringement litigation is the higher quantums of litigation funds being spent by those litigants than by my litigation clients and the extent to which those funds are being spent wisely or not.
Ordinarily, a huge publicly-traded corporation will hire a heavily-staffed law firm or team of lawyers to pursue its high-stakes civil litigation, in part out of anticipation that the opponent will do the same and in part because the selected law firm may already be doing a big chunk of the corporation’s legal work. A critical challenge is for those corporations to justify the resulting huge litigation price tags to shareholders. Litigants hiring my law firm know that on the one hand my price tag will not need to cover huge overhead expenses, but that on the other hand if a big team of lawyers and assistants is needed, they either will need to look elsewhere or have me as part of a team of lawyers from more than one law firm.
YouTube.com makes available not only the opportunity for subscribers to upload home videos to the Internet, but to upload pretty much any video to the Internet. YouTube apparently is diligent in removing video uploads when the owner of the copied material claims copyright infringement. However, YouTube apparently does not remove such videos before receiving a complaint. (On the flip side, it seems that YouTube has a more proactive system to prevent nudity from reaching web viewers, which makes one wonder whether YouTube has software to check for nudity or has someone checking…