Viacom Lawyer: Suing Downloaders Bullying, DRM Bad

[admin]

Well this is something you didn't expect to hear from a major copyright holder, least of all from their lawyer, but Michael Fricklas, general counsel at Viacom, told a bunch of students at Yale Law School a whole bunch of truth.

That suing individual downloaders seemed like "bullying", with the expensive lawyers and unlimited resources being used against individuals seemingly like "terrorism" (his words, not mine).

He even went on to say that DRM, especially the earlier kind, was "really bad" and that fair use was the way to go from now on.

Has Viacom, who is currently suing YouTube for copyright infringement, changed their ways, or is Mr. Fricklas only telling the students what they wanted to hear?

More:

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/technology/2009/11/17/viacom-lawyer-says-suing-illegal-downloaders-feels-like-bullying-115875-21829913/

[drfsupercenter]

Of course, when he says the "earlier kind" of DRM... they're just gonna use a different form of DRM, say iTunes instead of Windows Media... either way it needs to be gone entirely.

Until they give you a DIVX AVI file, or even a h.264 mpeg-4 file on a DVD and call that a Digital Copy with no need to have iTunes installed, I'll finally respect it a little bit, since it'll actually be worth something.

But of course, that'll never happen. Long live transcoders and encoders...

[doctorhardware]

Same thing happened with directTV, their lawyers were sending out the threatening letters. They wanted to see who would fold, and pay them the couple of thousand dollars that would make the case go away. Many people did, but even more did not.