WASHINGTON, DC — While women may swoon over Johnny Depp in piratical eyeliner and men may emulate his snappy seafaring outlaw wardrobe, the sad reality in the video world is that pirates aren’t very sexy – although they’re plenty interested in sexual content. As both the mainstream and adult industries grapple with fans creative unauthorized copies of copyright protected materials, Viacom’s CEO has called for unity among content creators and digital distributors.
Phillippe Dauman encouraged hundreds of industry peers attending a D.C. anti-piracy summit hosted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to “usher in an unprecedented period of creative output across the globe” by installing more “safeguards” including copy-protecting features and filtering tools, such as watermarking.
While penny-poor consumers may celebrate the ease with which digital media can be replicated and stored, Dauman bemoaned the fact that “at the lick of the mouse” a person can become the proud, if unauthorized owner of “all manner of intellectual property.”
Given the mass of materials being pirated, the effectiveness of digital-rights management (DRM) has become a subject of much debate. Although Dauman, whose company dominates the video programming for mobile device marketplace and owns hundreds of websites, strongly supports the use of DRM features, some competitors are moving away from it.
Among those companies experimenting with alternative methods of doing business is Amazon.com, which hopes to give Apple’s iTunes a run for its money by avoiding the methodology, which is famous for aggravating consumers.
As part of its move to prove that Viacom is not a “media holdout resisting change,” the company has recently introduced Flux, its social-networking platform. It anticipates earning more than half a billion dollars thanks to the move.
“It is obviously impossible to check every computer or look over the shoulder of every user to see if they have a license, and we don’t want to,” he assured the audience when admitting that his company both supports fair use and would be delighted to see its properties on “every nook and cranny of the internet,” if the creators were agreeable and properly compensated.
Those very creators, as well as internet service providers (ISPs), hosting companies, site owners, and other professionals need to be part of the battle against piracy, according to Dauman, who praised cable companies that have begun working “cooperatively” with Viacom to contact individuals with unauthorized materials. Also on his list of companies doing it right is AT&T, which he applauded for “realizing the potential of new network tools” useful in detecting pirated warez.
Dauman admitted that the assistance of government muscle in international trade negotiations would be appreciated in the fight against content piracy, but insisted that new laws are not the best way to address the issue. Indeed, he proposed that such laws might actually hinder the ability of ISPs to tackle the problem.
In an obvious jab at both Swedish BitTorrent file-tracking site The Pirate Bay and the Google search engine, Dauman pointed out the irony of the former releasing videos before they even hit the theater – and the importance of his company’s lawsuit against the latter, stating that the “landmark case” against YouTube “will clarify the rights and responsibilities of all media and content owners in the digital age.”
Dauman indicated that give how much Google depends upon its own software’s intellectual property, he finds the court case “ironic.”
