Creating Web Communities
YouTube, MySpace and FaceBook are other examples of nontradi-
tional news sources that have created Web communities, or sites
where people can share information about themselves or other people.
Web communities have become so big that both traditional and
new media are gobbling them up to try to cash in on this latest trend.
Media mogul Rupert Murdoch bought the social-networking and blog-
ging service MySpace in 2005, and Google soon followed by acquiring
YouTube in 2006.
YouTube is everywhere on the Web when it comes to online video.
Visitors to the site can find everything from television shows, broadcast
news clips, local news stories and campaign commercials to personal videos,
musical performances and amateur films. The result? Rarely seen videos and
obscure news now make headlines throughout the online community.
Shortly after its founding, YouTube made it even easier to capture and
post breaking news. Because news happens any time and any place, it
started a service that enabled people to upload videos from their cell
phones and mobile devices directly to YouTube’s Web site. Users simply
e-mail video straight from their cell phones, iPhones or PDAs. Many
Web sites, including news services, allow people to subscribe to have
specific types of news sent directly to their phones or PDAs.
Artist Andy Warhol once said, “In the future, everyone will be
famous for 15 minutes.” Little did he know just how right he would be:
YouTube and other Web communities have given every person a venue
to be seen and heard.464 MIXED MEDIA
Web com munity
a Web site on which people
can share information about
themselves or other people
OutTake
The Old Versus the New
In March 2007, Viacom sued Google
and YouTube for “massive intentional
copyright infringement.” According to
the complaint, Viacom claims YouTube
has a “brazen disregard” of the law,
and it “harnessed technology to willfully
infringe copyrights on a huge scale,
depriving writers, composers and per-
formers of the rewards they are owed.”
Viacom claims that YouTube had
posted 160,000 clips from its television
and cable programming—including Jon
Stewart’s The Daily Show and MTV’s
reality shows and music videos—with-
out permission or paying for them.When it comes to the digital world,
however, copyright is a bit unclear.
Although not the first lawsuit of an
“old” media company suing a “new”
media company, it was the largest copy-
right lawsuit to date—$1 billion. In fact,
old media and new media rarely see
eye to eye or think the same way. Sites
like Google think giving people access
to more books, movies and informa-
tion will make people buy more things.
Companies like Viacom, however,
simply see their revenues dwindling
as people view their wares for free.
As one Viacom rep said, “Like ourpeers in the media industry, we are
focused on finding the right business
model for professionally created content
to be legally distributed on the Internet.
We want our audiences to be able to
access our programming on every plat-
form and we’re interested in having it live
on all forms of distribution in ways that
protect our talented artists, our loyal cus-
tomers and our passionate audiences.”
Did Viacom really want to go to
court? Probably not. It merely wanted
to make a point, and to make money.
According to owner Sumner Redstone,
“If you want to use us, pay us.”