Viacom And NBC Inject Themselves Into Online Video Litigation
Viacom and NBC aren't content with suing YouTube and other video sites for copyright infringement - they are also trying to inject their opinions into other lawsuits that they are not otherwise involved in.
Context & Ripple Effects
The move extends a strategy both companies have been running since spring. In May 2007 filings backing Robert Tur, NBC and Viacom first signaled they would argue in cases where they were not the plaintiff; this report shows that was not a one-off but an ongoing effort to shape how courts read copyright liability for video sites. It sits on top of the direct front: Viacom's $1 billion suit against Google over YouTube clips filed in March 2007, followed by its lawyer's public claim that YouTube knows it violates copyrights.
First-order effects
- Defendants in smaller online video copyright cases — sites without Viacom or NBC's legal budgets — now face coordinated arguments from two major content owners whose resources dwarf the parties actually litigating.
- YouTube and Google must defend their case against not just Viacom's complaint but a widening body of network-backed argument accumulating across the docket around them.
Second-order effects
- The filings buy time and favorable framing while NBC builds its distribution alternative — the still-unlaunched NBC/News Corp joint venture announced in March 2007 — so the legal pressure lands just before the networks' own authorized service reaches market.
- Other video-sharing sites face a rising cost of litigation risk, pushing them toward licensing deals or takedown-heavy policies rather than fighting on fair-use grounds alone.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, content owners will treat amicus-style intervention as standard practice to shape safe-harbor doctrine for user-generated video, making landmark rulings turn less on any single plaintiff and more on an industry-wide legal coalition.
The trend: Major media companies are shifting from isolated infringement suits to coordinated courtroom advocacy aimed at rewriting the liability rules for user-uploaded video.