ReadWriteWeb

In 1959 (as I recall), my mother, an acclaimed professional artist, had entered a handful of her oil paintings into an annual art show. Someone attending the show noted that one particular work, the face of a peasant boy, strongly resembled a photograph that had appeared in Life magazine. Well, there was no coincidence about it: Mom had studied precisely that face, and her work was based on that photograph. (The card tacked to the wall actually said so, if anyone had bothered to read it.)

So it was that the local newspaper "exposed" my mother as a fraud, a counterfeiter. It ran a story with the painting next to the Life magazine photograph itself. Thus began a lifelong dialog that became one of the threads of my life: a case study in fair use that fueled endless debates in the Socratic method between Mom and her art students for the next four decades. It began with the delicious irony of the newspaper having reprinted the Life photograph without Time-Life's permission, and embraced the lovely fact Mom eventually sold the painting for many times the original price.

May 2010 was a great month for YouTube. Not only did users of Google's online video service stream more videos per month in the U.S. than ever before (14.6 billion), but according to online analytics firm comScore, every single YouTube user now watches more than 100 videos per month. In total, Google's video properties now command slightly more than 43% of the online video market. No other online video service currently owns more than 3.5% of the streaming video market. In total, about 183 million Internet users in the U.S. watched online video last month.

Google just announced that a U.S. district court has granted the company's motion for summary judgment in Viacom's $1 billion lawsuit against YouTube. The court argued that YouTube is protected by the so-called "safe harbor" provision. Viacom first sued Google in 2007 and the court case continued to simmer ever since. Viacom accused YouTube of deliberately withholding filtering technologies and knowingly infringing on the company's copyright.

In the ongoing copyright litigation between Google and Viacom, a judge on the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York has ordered Google (PDF) to hand over data on every YouTube user, including username, the associated IP address, and a list of all the the videos that user ever watched.

In this lawsuit, Viacom is seeking more than $1 billion in damages because of alleged copyright violations on YouTube.