Protect YouTube, or ensure 'free' video sharing!

For a couple of months, my evening entertainment source has not been TV or DVDs. Honestly it's just been YouTube, and sometimes Google Video!

It's just amazing; this "video on demand" revolution. I am a big fan of the 80s, my favorite decade, and YouTube provides me with videos of every song I fondly remember from back then, and videos of the songs I listened to but never saw.

That's exactly why copyright holders are suing YouTube!

Having lost me, and millions of other viewers, I understand that TV empires like Viacom (owners of MTV, VH1 ..etc) are very scared of YouTube.

YouTube is delivering 100 million vidoes a day to viewers, how much of that is intellectual property is not clear, but Viacom estimates that it has lost 1 Billion in revenues from YouTube so far. That's probably an exaggeration now, but might be true in the coming years.

Maybe they should learn from the lessons of the past, that no one can stop technology evolution and consumer choice.

Instead, they need to sign an agreement with YouTube, by which they could share advertising revenue for Viacom content, or use YouTube to show previews of their top shows and generate more interest in their stations!

Already, the BBC has such a deal, and it's promoting it latest shows.

But it seems that the problem with Viacom is that it owns music station properties, and its music programming (whether shows, interviews) isn't the same as a top rated series like Lost or Prison Break which users must tune into a TV station for. Inciddently, it seems that some of the music property holders like Sony BMG are fine with YouTube, and have signed deals.

There must be solutions. YouTube and other video sharing sites, including ones in the Arab World like Clipat and Ikbis, deserve to continue to serve customers with the freedom of comprehensive content.

YouTube, and its owner Google, have a responsibility as market leaders to sort out this mess, make peace with media companies and property rights owners, and lay the right foundations for this booming online video revolution.

I for one, will be thoroughly disappointed if I can't watch my 80s music videos, or clips of interviews with these artists, and clips from the greatest 80s TV shows in Britain which I could never see as a teenager here in Amman!

This case will set the legal precedent that could govern our digital entertainment in the future.

If Viacom and other TV empires allow free video viewing on their own sites, without a subscription fee, then all that will happen is that we'll move our viewing 'channel' from YouTube to Viacom.com and so on. But, what's the guarantee of that happening?

We should raise our voices to protect our right to free viewing. Let them make money off advertising. It should be interesting to see how this story ends.

zanasser@gmail.com

The legal battle for MP3!

Did you know that there’s a legal battle regarding who owns the rights (patents) to MP3!

Imagine that a file-compression standard used to create billions of music files, circulating the globe through the Internet and sitting on millions of music players is owned by someone who wants money in return for your use, and money from the MP3 player manufacturers and everyone else involved!

Greedy, you may think. Well, according to international laws governing intellectual property rights, it’s the right of whoever created this technology to benefit from it, if it was patented (registered). Apparently, the problem is that several parties are claiming part-ownership of this music standard. And, as you would expect, a legal battle has been raging.

Like everything else being researched in today’s modern world, I first checked the Wikipedia entry for MP3. Here are some excepts of what I found.

“MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3, more commonly referred to as MP3, is a popular digital audio encoding, lossy compression format, and algorithm, designed to greatly reduce the amount of data required to represent audio. It was invented by a team of German engineers of the Fraunhofer Society, who worked in the framework of the EUREKA 147 DAB digital radio research program, and it became an ISO/IEC standard in 1991.”

Now, fast forward to what happened last week. “Microsoft got slapped with a massive $1.52 billion judgement for infringing on Lucent's patents related to MP3, but the issue of who owns the patent rights to MP3 isn't exactly clear. Microsoft thought it was in the clear since the company had licensed the MP3 codec from Germany's Fraunhofer Institute (members of which are pictured above), which bills itself as "the birthplace of MP3", but there are a bunch of companies which claim to have had at least something to do with creating the codec.”

Thomson, Philips, and Bell Labs (which was part of AT&T, but is now part of Alcatel-Lucent) all played a part. Not to mention Texas MP3 Technologies, which came out of nowhere to sue Apple, Samsung, and SanDisk recently. That’s quite a mess, isn’t it?

Apparently, the real problem is that MP3 evolved as a standard which builds on the work of earlier codecs and formats, so it's easy for a variety of different entities to legitimately lay claim to having some patents related to its creation.

So, what does this all mean, if and when a party, or a group of parties, are awarded the MP3 intellectual property? It means there’s a lot of money to be made by these people. Every MP3 music player manufacturer will pay fee, every seller of MP3 music files will pay annual fee or share of profits and you, the consumer, will be paying that added difference.

It’s sickening! This fiasco makes you admire Apple more, for using Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) instead of MP3 in its online music store (iTunes) and iPod devices. It’s also a better standard which delivers higher quality sound, but most importantly it’s clearly the intellectual property of Sony (no legal battles there) and AAC files and players are being sold to the public within reasonable pricing!

The MP3 standard must be similarly managed, but it’s anyone’s guess what will happen now. Let’s wait and see.

zanasser@gmail.com