Titan wants Veoh's ass on a plate

[Matt 26z]

I don't think Veoh (or any major video upload site) ever sat down and decided that it would be part of their business model to encourage users to post unlicensed porn content.

Instead of going after the actual uploaders like the RIAA is currently doing at YouTube, Titan goes after the video site itself.

Let's be realistic. If you are going to hold companies responsible for what content their users upload, then you may as well just shut down the internet as we have come to know it. Close down MySpace, all the blog sites, eBay, etc... You would even have to shut down this very message board. What if I copy and paste copyrighted text into here? Should Lee be responsible for that, or me?

Veoh is not some low brow warez or P2P site. It is operated by very well known individuals in corporate America. The idea that they are trying to profit off of stolen porn is ridiculous.



And rick... Guba is not the only company to sell access to USENET. All the major ISP's filter out newsgroups (or simply don't carry the ones a user wants), so a lot of people choose to pay a monthly fee for newsgroup freedom. This has been going on for at least the past decade. Giganews.com, Supernews.com and Alt.net are among the most well known.

[rick]

And rick... Guba is not the only company to sell access to USENET. All the major ISP's filter out newsgroups (or simply don't carry the ones a user wants), so a lot of people choose to pay a monthly fee for newsgroup freedom. This has been going on for at least the past decade. Giganews.com, Supernews.com and Alt.net are among the most well known.

Do any of those reformat the videos? Do any of those pay webmasters to promote stolen content?

You're obviously not a content provider or a paysite owner.

Let's say you find the hottest male model in the world who will do anything. He demands a high price, so you shoot 6 videos and pay him $6,000 for this. You put these videos in your paysite and spend a lot to advertise the fact he's exclusive to your site, does double anal, whatever.

You then find out another company has taken one of your videos, reformatted it to iPod compatibility, and is selling access to it and paying webmasters to promote the fact your video is in iPod format.

You, of course, don't make a single cent from this. But you do read on GWW that webmaster X has made $600 this week promoting your video from another company.

How would YOU feel then?

[basschick]

without stolen porn, they wouldn't have a third of the members who buy or pay for whatever it is that veoh makes money from. why? because they wouldn't have content that makes people come back. veoh, corporate or not, is using stolen porn as free content.

i either have to pay to license my content or else i have to pay a model. why shouldn't veoh do the same?

Veoh is not some low brow warez or P2P site. It is operated by very well known individuals in corporate America. The idea that they are trying to profit off of stolen porn is ridiculous.



And rick... Guba is not the only company to sell access to USENET. All the major ISP's filter out newsgroups (or simply don't carry the ones a user wants), so a lot of people choose to pay a monthly fee for newsgroup freedom. This has been going on for at least the past decade. Giganews.com, Supernews.com and Alt.net are among the most well known.

[Titanmen]

Rick and Basschick..I LOVE YOU! You both "get it", I wish everyone understood the ramifications this presents to our industry as a whole.

Rick hit a key point...2257! When you knowingly authorize and broadcast adult material you have responsability AND liability under 2257 laws.

Could you imagine the Spice Channel letting people broadcast adult content without checking 2257 labeling or documentation? Would never happen in a million years!

You cannot knowingly broadcast and distribute adult content without following 2257 laws...period! Had 2257 laws been followed properly our content would not have been illegally broadcast and distributed.

Distribution and broadcast of adult materials comes with additional responsabilites, both legally and ethically. If you are going to play in the adult world you had better know and follow the rules we all must abide by!

[CorbinFisher_BD]

I'm quite pleased Titan is doing what it's doing, and I very much feel that their being so aggressive when it comes to protecting their content and copyrights benefits all producers.

I also feel it is simply impossible for sites like Veoh or other user-driven video delivery sites to be unaware of the amount of unauthorized content being broadcast via their services in violation of countless producers' copyrights. And I would not doubt in the least that a considerable portion of Veoh's usership - thus revenue as well - used the site expressly to either distribute or view copyrighted material.

If you're going to start a site like Veoh or YouTube or XTube or whatever, you have to anticipate and expect copyright issues. It is completely inevitable and moreso, entirely predictable. So if they did not have a structure or measures in place to adequately deal with what was nothing but inevitable, that is entirely their fault.

[Titanmen]

The big differance between Youtube and the other video sharing sites and VEOH was that VEOH specifically chose to distribute adult. None of the other video sharing sites would knowingly accept and distribute adult content. Why is that? Most likely because of 2257 regulations and potentially embarrasing PR issues.

How does an upstart company like VEOH get users away from already established giants like YouTube?? Perhaps by allowing adult content on their site, giving them a major advantage over the other existing video sharing websites. The distribution of adult content could have drawn a huge influx of new users and increased their installed user base dramtically.

Do you think people really went there to watch Pepsi and Mentos explosion clips??? They most likely went there to get free high quality porn will VEOH looked the other way.

What does a huge installed user base allow you to do?? It allows you to get millions in venture capital funding! Once you have your installed user base AND millions in venture capital funding what do you do? You overnight dump all the adult content from your network and erase it completely from your system like it never existed.

Lesson learned....use adult content to get traffic and increase your user base, then dump it all and go clean when you get venture capital funding.

[CorbinFisher_BD]

Admittedly, those mentos in the soda clips are pretty neat.

[Toni_Enzo]

Ok... so what's the difference between Veoh and Rapidshare or megaupload and GUBA for inistance?

I don't get it... they all have tons and tons of copyrighted material... but nobody went after rapidshare so far... or Guba and similiar usenet services... Is it impossible or what?

I don't get this whole spectrum of uploading/sharing sites... Is Rapidshare somehow protected from liability?

[Titanmen]

Major issues regarding liability are based on knowledge and transformation.

VEOH has a group of editors that review and approve all clips before they go live. As well, they specifically ask if the content is adult in nature, but do not ask for any 2257 labeling/documentation. They had "knowledge" of the content, they had "knowledge" that it was specifically adult without any 2257 labeling/documentation.

If they had followed 2257 they would have rejected any content without proper labeling, and/or they would have known who the owner/producers of the clips where. They turned a blind eye and used adult content to get users to their site. That shows knowledge and willfull disregard.

Second issue is transformation of the content. VEOH takes the base file formats and converts it into Flash streaming previews embedded on their website. This shows material transformation of the content. They are no longer mearly a "conduit", they actively transform and broadcast the content.

Knowledge and active transformation of content shows clear liability in this case.

This is just the first case, we've got others in the crosshairs as well!

[Dzinerbear]

Instead of going after the actual uploaders like the RIAA is currently doing at YouTube, Titan goes after the video site itself.

Matt,

Let's say it was content that you yourself produced and spent a lot of money to create, would you not go after everyone and anyone associated with it's distribution? I recently found a site that had four of my pictures, I went ballistic. I e-mail the domain owner, the ISP, and who I thought was running the program. I also threatened to start contacting every sponsor represented on that page and start complaining that they were all making money off my content. I was going to make life as miserable as possible for this thief and I was going to do whatever I could first before I had to hire a lawyer. And btw, I think it's an absolute travesty of justice that I have hire a lawyer and pay for his fees because some thief steals my stuff. It might be fine for a milti-million corporate like Titan who has access to money, but I don't and hiring a lawyer would hurt me financially. And it ain't fare to Titan even though they have a lot of money because the money they spend on legal fees could be going into making more great movies, employee incentive and benefit programs, marketing, advertising, AIDS eductation, or shit, just into the owner's bank account where it belongs.

Suggesting that the victimized, i.e. Titan, only go after the uploaders is ridiculous. How many surfers do you suppose are using real e-mail address, names and real addresses? No, they're absolutely right to go after the source. Besides, if they go after the source, in this case Veoh, then they force Veoh to change their copyright policies, they cause them to look at their own networks and clean them up, they force them to establish rules about copyrighted content. Going after thousands of surfers is just too time-consuming and cumbersome.

Although mind you, it wouldn't be a bad idea to pick a few hundred or so surfers and target them and prosecute them. Word would spread: If you share a Titan video, they're coming after you.

But really, this whole situation is reactionary, it doesn't really deal with the problem: people think that if it's on the Net, it's there for the taking. Most people wouldn't think about walking into a library and ripping out a page of their favourite book, or walking into a DVD store and just walking out the door with 10 DVDs. I don't know how we get this to stop, I suppose prosecution is one of the ways. It just seems to me that our society has a bring problem with a sense of entitlement. We're entitled to have what we want when we want it and pay as little or nothing as we possibly can; we're entitled to know everything we want to know about celebrities, oh shit, it just goes on ... it's sickening.

Michael

[Titanmen]

Thanks Michael! Trust me, I take it just as personally as you do! When you steal from Titan I will hunt you down with the last breath I have! ;-)

To put things in perspective for everyone about what a huge problem this is...Last year alone we sent out 475,000 cease and desist notices for the online theft of our content. Yes, you heard right we caught almost a 1/2 million people stealing our content online! And that is just the people we caught, I'm sure there are 10 times that many that we did not catch.

Fortunately we use the same spidering/reporting service used by the MPAA and RIAA, so it is all automated and done by a huge database.

Our content is all we have, it is the most valuable asset we own. If we lose control of it we might as well shut the doors and all go home. Until then we will proactively and agressively protect our content by whatever means legally available to us. This is good for us and for the industry as a whole.

[Matt 26z]

Online service and content providers have limited copyright liability under the DMCA's safe harbor provisions.

I hope this goes to trial and isn't settled out of court. This is the first of the new video sites to get into hot water, so I'd like to see what happens.

I know a lot of you take an "either you are with the industry, or against us" stance on anything related to content theft, but my prediction is that Titan loses or it's settled out of court.

I'm not saying I support content theft, I just think this is what will happen.

[desslock]

Major issues regarding liability are based on knowledge and transformation.

VEOH has a group of editors that review and approve all clips before they go live. As well, they specifically ask if the content is adult in nature, but do not ask for any 2257 labeling/documentation. They had "knowledge" of the content, they had "knowledge" that it was specifically adult without any 2257 labeling/documentation.

If they had followed 2257 they would have rejected any content without proper labeling, and/or they would have known who the owner/producers of the clips where. They turned a blind eye and used adult content to get users to their site. That shows knowledge and willfull disregard.

Second issue is transformation of the content. VEOH takes the base file formats and converts it into Flash streaming previews embedded on their website. This shows material transformation of the content. They are no longer mearly a "conduit", they actively transform and broadcast the content.

Knowledge and active transformation of content shows clear liability in this case.

This is just the first case, we've got others in the crosshairs as well!

Are you saying that VEOH is criminally liable because they were not complying with your interpretation of 2257?

Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but are you invoking 2257 as a basis for your own legal claim here???

Steve

[Titanmen]

This has nothing to do with "criminal" liability, it is about civil liability. We are not using 2257 as a "basis" for our case, we have much stronger evidence for the direct infringement of our property.

In our case for "wilfull infringement" and to seek enhanced damages we will use the 2257 issue to our help build our case.

VEOH is not a member of the FSC and is not covered by the injunction currently in place. Therefore they are subject to the new and enhanced 2257 regulations as a "secondary producer".

It's not a matter of whether you agree with the law or not, it's still currently the law until someone challenges it and overturns it. Unless you are covered under the FSC injunction you are liable for the full extent of the new 2257 regulations.

If VEOH doesn't think they need to conform to the new 2257 regulations let them argue that to the judge.

[desslock]

My apologies, I should have said civil liability. I"m not a lawyer. But I *thought* that's what you were saying.

I thought you were involking 2257 for your own purposes and in that manner. Hmmmm. So seek to use 2257 to ultimately control the use of your content.

I take it you joined the FSC too, so your other hand can be washed of potential applications of the law by the DOJ?

Sounds like you've got some great lawyers to help you assert yourselves. I guess we could call you folks truly the smartest guys in the room.

Steve