“F— those motherf—ers”: YouTube/Viacom suit gets nasty
The sad thing about today’s new YouTube/Viacom document dump? That the e-mails cited in it were written by adults.
Neither side comes out looking terrific—which was also true the first time the two sides aired their dirty laundry in public.
So here you have it—a short course in becoming a media mogul:
- Viacom quotes YouTube employee Maryrose Dunton telling an engineer to "'forget about the email alerts stuff' precisely because 'I hate making it easier for these a-holes' – referring to copyright owners – and 'we’re just trying to cover our asses so we don’t get sued.'"
- Viacom complains that YouTube employees “sneered at rights holders as ‘copyright bastards’ and ‘a-holes.’”
- Google retorts that Viacom can’t complain about this language, and it quotes numerous Viacom execs to make its point. Sample outbursts include, “fuck you, you Google bastards,” “bastards at Google are harassing me,” and the eloquent “fuck those mother fuckers.”
- A Viacom VP even complained about the "fucking assholes" at YouTube—because the company "enforced its repeat-infringer policy concerning a Viacom marketing account that had received multiple take-down notices from Viacom's legal department." The lulz, they are here in spades.
- Viacom top brass wrote e-mails with more exclamation points than my niece would even consider decent. They also had what Google calls an “obsession” with buying YouTube.
- Case in point: “I WANT TO OWN YOUTUBE. I think it’s critical, and if it goes to a competitor…..!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” That was from MTV Networks head Judy McGrath.
- Viacom CEO Tom Freston wrote, "If we get UTube? I wanna run it." McGrath responded, "You'll have to kill me to get to it first."
- Freston on his own mergers & acquisitions team: "No M&A team in recent history could have a poorer record than us. We are a joke… and our failed judgments and heavy handed behavior have cost us HUGELY."
Perhaps most interesting, out of all this juvenile nonsense, was a document dug up by YouTube. It came from a training manual targeted at user-generated content (in which Viacom sites have their own interests).
The first lines read: “User generated content should never be monitored. Something that can’t bear enough repeating is that the User Abuse Team and Atom Entertainment in general, does not and should not, actively monitor any of its web sites for content violations regarding content submitted or generated by its users.” [Update: Viacom says that this policy was drafted by a site it acquired and that the policy was changed after the acquisition. Viacom's current policy is to screen uploaded content.]
As for the main arguments here, they look like a lot more of the same, with each side trying to prove that the other’s “smoking guns” are actually irrelevant drivel. If one thing emerges from the documents, it’s that the two sides do not like each other.
Now that the case has really gotten ugly, kissing and making nice looks decreasingly likely.
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