Google v. Viacom (or, More Babies on Rockets)

Multi-Billion-Dollar Global Corporation Google has asked a US court to dismiss a copyright action against it by Mutli-Billion-Dollar Global Corporation Viacom. Viacom insists that Google are acting illegally by refusing to screen Youtube videos for copyright material (such as some of Viacom’s shimmering cultural gems, like Pimp My Ride and Date My Mom). Google, in turn, argues that the action is a threat to the internet itself (“The children, won’t somebody PLEASE think of the children?!”). The keen legal minds amongst you will doubtless be aware of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (1998, but I hardly need to tell you that) which states that web companies are not legally responsible for what their users place on their website.

We’ve been here before, with parenting website Mumsnet defending themselves against charges of libel for what users had published on their forums (notably that childcare expert Gina Ford had tied babies to rockets and launched them into Southern Lebanon – which she didn’t, despite what critics of Ehud Olmert would have you believe). Google, like Mumsnet, are arguing that the internet is a public space, whilst Viacom argue that Google are profiting from a business model which sells advertising in that public space and then does not efficiently regulate what is said in it.

We still seem to lack a coherent theoretical framework for thinking about the internet as a public (or private) space. It is all very well to speak of it analagously to Habermas’s public sphere, but the analogy breaks down with the lack of corporeality and accountability. The internet thrives on free speech, but we have failed to recognise that online speech is, for the most part, actually writing, and writing carries with it a certain weight of archival evidence. What is written digitally is much less ephemeral than what is spoken, face to face, offline. It strikes me that, mostly unconsciously, we have transferred a rather idealised model of intimate, fleeting conversation onto web-based communications which may have the appearance of being intimate and fleeting but which are – by and large – neither. Pretty much everything is archived somewhere. What might pass as hearsay offline is also called hearsay online, when it is, in fact, “see-written”. The (very eightenth-century Enlightenment) politics of web 2.0 make much of this great conversation that we are all having with each other. We need a theoretical framework (a philosophy, whatever) to grapple with the fact that said conversation is not just going to blow away on the wind. It would certainly make people think about what they posted online, anyway…