With its own site for its copyrighted video content due out this month, NBC is already getting a little touchy. Peter Chernin, president and COO of News Corp, chides that Google “could do a better job” of policing for copyrighted content on YouTube, saying:
YouTube could do a much more aggressive job about taking down content that is a copyright violator. It’s pretty safe to say that they [Google] have the technology available … it’s publicly available and I haven’t yet heard a lot about Google being technologically constrained.
Google’s not the only one on their enemies list. NBCU’s CEO Jeff Zucker is campaigning to the federal government. According to Hollywood Reporter, he said that:
Zucker told the largely friendly audience that the theft of intellectual property whether its a movie, TV show or pair of brake pads has reached crises proportions.
“The unfortunate truth is that today we are losing the battle,” he said as he urged members of the Chamber to join the entertainment industry in a national effort to combat the threat.
“Our unified voices will carry far more weight than the pleas of the individual industries,” he said.
To back up his call, Zucker cited a study by the industry-friendly Institute for Policy Innovation study released Wednesday that found the impact of intellectual property piracy among all the copyright industries is nearly $60 billion a year, cost about 373,000 jobs and $2.6 billion in lost tax revenue.
Terry Heaton says that Zucker followed this up with by asking for telecoms to police and “weed out pirated content and unclog networks” (Heaton then rips that argument to shreds.)
Is the posturing, as Heaton postulates, a corporate shill for telecoms? Or is it a publicity attempt to make their imminent, “legit” solution all the more appealing?
via Techmeme and Mashable
