In the news, Viacom is suing Google/YouTube for over $1 billion in copyright damages. The folks at the multi-million dollar corporation think that they are losing a lot of money to YouTube. However, according to their 4th quarter financial reports, their net profit nearly quadrupled to $480.8 million. We should feel sorry for them. Clearly they’re the ones being victimized here.

I’ve got to say, I really don’t understand why these big corporations are so against free advertisement. I mean, ultimately that’s all that these pirated videos are. They don’t seem to understand that the people who are posting them and watching these videos are already loyal consumers of their products. The folks who post and watch episodes of South Park and The Venture Brothers are already huge fans of the shows. If anything, they are gaining more viewers and fans through the people who watch these videos. Don’t these corporations have marketing people working for them? If they were to work with the internet rather than against it, I’m sure that they could find a very lucrative way of providing their content free of charge.

They are even upset that some users have been posting commercials and music videos! Now does that make any sense at all? They spend thousands, if not millions of dollars to create the commercial or music video. Then they have to spend thousands, if not millions of dollars to put the commercial on air. So why would they not like the fact that someone out there liked the video enough to post it, FOR FREE, somewhere where millions of people will be able to see it?
Why is it that the big media corporations are so afraid of the internet? Because it would require them to rethink their entire approach to business. Rather than be innovative, they prefer to be stuck in their ways and hope that it somehow pans out for them. Their logic seems to go something like this:



The media corporations, like Viacom, need to think about what the internet and the media industry will look like in 5 or even 10 years, not how they can stop one person from pirating videos today. This is why I believe that the new start-ups of today will be the major players in the media industry in a few years. The people who are working and creating on the internet right now are setting the framework and laying the ground rules for the direction the industry takes in the future. In conclusion, my message to the big media corporations is:



(I apologize if this entry is too rant based and not all that funny, but I had to get it out of my system. I promise to return to teh funniness next time.)