In the ongoing lawsuit Viacom has against Google/YouTube, today we get this interesting revelation:
For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site. It deliberately “roughed up” the videos to make them look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube accounts using phony email addresses. It even sent employees to Kinko’s to upload clips from computers that couldn’t be traced to Viacom. And in an effort to promote its own shows, as a matter of company policy Viacom routinely left up clips from shows that had been uploaded to YouTube by ordinary users. Executives as high up as the president of Comedy Central and the head of MTV Networks felt “very strongly” that clips from shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report should remain on YouTube.
So Viacom is saying that YouTube is illegally storing their videos, yet Viacom is putting them on the servers. This would be the same thing as parking your car in the neighbor’s driveway then accuse him of stealing it. Totally amazing.