Google and Viacom blend high-profile copyright suits with extreme profanity, as nature intended

You know what I'm interested in? Copyright lawsuits.

And profanity.

Lucky for me, Google and Viacom have provided both today, in the form of a series of emails released through the discovery process in Viacom's billion-dollar lawsuit against YouTube. In these emails, the two companies take turns cussin' and spittin' and swearin' about each other. Hilarity ensues. Ars Technica rounds up some of the highlights.

# Viacom complains that YouTube employees "sneered at rights holders as 'copyright bastards' and 'a-holes.'
# Google retorts that Viacom can't complain about this language, and it quotes numerous Viacom execs to make its point. Sample outbursts include, "fuck you, you Google bastards," "bastards at Google are harassing me," and the eloquent "fuck those mother fuckers."
# A Viacom VP even complained about the "fucking assholes" at YouTube--because the company "enforced its repeat-infringer policy concerning a Viacom marketing account that had received multiple take-down notices from Viacom's legal department." The lulz, they are here in spades.
# Viacom top brass wrote e-mails with more exclamation points than my niece would even consider decent. They also had what Google calls an "obsession" with buying YouTube.
# Case in point: "I WANT TO OWN YOUTUBE. I think it's critical, and if it goes to a competitor.....!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" That was from MTV Networks head Judy McGrath.
# Viacom CEO Tom Freston wrote, "If we get UTube... I wanna run it." McGrath responded, "You'll have to kill me to get to it first."

"F--- those motherf---ers": YouTube/Viacom suit gets nasty

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for future developments see “Kosy Kinkwicket”.
glblrbewhjaats your name?
ian71

Dear Whomever Wants To Buy YouTube:

a) you can’t afford it
b) even if you do buy it, once you try to make it profitable all the fun will go out of it and everyone will fuck off to another site.
c) Have a nice day.
d) I said “fuck off” right there. I hope that’s okay.
Anonymous

So MTV IS run by teenagers. It all makes sense now…
Rob Beschizza

I just love the fact that YouTube banned Viacom’s own marketing account after it was DMCAd by Viacom’s legal people, then Viacom got angry at YouTube for following policies that Viacom forced it to adopt.
Anonymous

Silly people, they don’t want to *buy* YouTube, they want it to be given to them, by the courts, wrapped up in a bow.

Their logic that says ‘content is king’ means they feel entitled to anything containing their content, even when it contains other content as well.
Anonymous

Where is the Benny Hill music at?

This is like watching a room full of monkeys in business suits slinging feces at each-other while jumping up and down. With one of them in the corner drinking its own lemonade for nourishment.

Sorry, forgot that I have to gotta dumb this down for the execs….!!!!!! YOUS DONTZ DESERVES YOUR JOBS!!!! KEYBOARD CAT CANZ DO BETTAZ!
- Anonymous
  
  hahahahahah…i spit at my laptop
- turn_self_off
  
  this would be the music in question?
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVS3QqrXhD8
jeligula

And you see? People complain that we Marines are foul-mouthed as we were trained to kill. How is this any less cut-throat? I submit that it is worse. Oh so much worse. The difference is that once I got out of the Corps, I made an effort to clean up my language and succeeded. A Marine will only kill an enemy; these folks will kill kittens to make a buck.
- devophill
  
  Off-topic, speaking of stereotypically foul-mouthed folks, I was chastised a few weeks ago for saying “fucking” while talking to my boss. Not in reference to him, mind you. I realize I have a mouth like a longshoreman, but that’s because I am a longshoreman.
  
  Oh well. Fuck it.
Ugly Canuck

I think “F*** them motherf***ers” has more a more streetwise ring, than “F*** those motherf***ers” does.
I mean, if you’re going to go over the fence, go all the way over, eh?
Wuss Brillis

I’ve never understood the word “motherfucker”.

Anyway it’s nice to see that the big ones can speak the language of the commons. For a moment I’d thought that money could educate monkeys.
Anonymous

Viacom CEO Tom Freston wrote, “If we get UTube… I wanna run it.” … into the ground
zikman

this is pure gold. what a bunch of lousy good-for-nothing fuckers over at viacom.

I mean really, “If we get UTube… I wanna run it.” ?
that’s like a nine year old calling shotgun. you can’t just call dibs like that.
Anonymous

The reason that “fuck” is considered unsuitable for polite society is that it was a Saxon word, and after the Norman conquest of England in 1066 Saxons were excluded from polite society.
Objecting to the use of the word is merely continuing a 900+ year old policy of ethno-cultural cleansing.
- Anonymous
  
  Yeah, like all those other Anglo-Saxon verbs: run, jump, hide, speak, think … Even the romance verbs from *futare* are considered obscene in Europe; the only difference is how much tolerance there is for obscenity in a given culture and age.
failix

As far as big evil corporations go out there, google is definitely the coolest of them all, and viacom one of the worst.
Anonymous

Capitalism, gotta hate it.
AirPillo

I’m not at all surprised that they all turned out to be dicks.

Viacom tried to take down every video that was a search result when they searched for their show’s titles (arrogant morons), and Youtube obeyed in total supplication (backstabbing pansies).
jgs

Ah, the Bad Lieutenant school of bidness management.
bcsizemo

Wow, it’s like watching a surreal version of high school or something….

To think these people all make like 20+ times more than I do, and they seem to have the mental capacity of a 10th grade bully….

I’m with Devophil, fuck it.
brian rutherford

Classy, very classy. So these are the kind of people that a top notch education produces.
Anonymous

So Legal undermined Marketing at Viacom HQ over this YouTube business?

Quite understandable if YouTube(and Google) told both divisions of Viacom to go away and get on the same page with each other before the company files any more DMCA notices under the circumstances.
robulus

“fuck you, you Google bastards”

Funny!
Anonymous

Viacom owns comedy central, right?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDmoDs8TXLE
PatrickKelley

This is a pretty good indication of how these people behave on-line in their private internet activities. If they were corresponding via snail-mail, or telephone, I bet they would never dream of conversing in this manner. People adapt these on-line personas that are akin to a Jekyll and Hyde condition.
dequeued

This is extremely funny.
This is exactly what I imagined the execs at Viacom to be like.

Bitter older people, who are still not quite comfortable sending emails, and hopelessly out of touch.

THE ONLY WAY WE CAN FIX UTUBE IS TO BUY IT AND CONTROL IT SO WE HAVE ACCESS TO ITS EXCLUSIVE CONTENT DISTRIBUTION CHANNEL!!!1!
WE CAN THEN TURN IT INTO TOOL FOR CROSS-PROMOTION OF OUR CONTENT1
MOTHERFUCKERS USING OUR CONTENT WITHOUT AUTHORIZATION WHERE THE FUCK DO THEY GET OFF//

ALSO, MY STUPID ASSISTANT TRIED TO SHOW ME HOW TO USE THIS “E-MAIL” BUT IT IS STILL DIFFICULT TO GET USED TO.
“THE OUTLOOK” KEEPS MAKING NOISES AND MESSAGES WHEN I TRY WRITING NEW “E-MAILS”

ANYWAY, UTUBE IS BLATANTLY STEALING OUR CUSTOMERS AND I SIMPLY DONT UNDERSTAND WHY WE CANT HAVE THEM THROWN IN JAIL LIKE OTHER BURGLARS WHO BURGLARIZE OUR CUSTOMERS AND INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY.

IN CONCLUSION, I WANT TO RUN UTUBE I AM MOST QUALIFIED, BECAUSE I RUN MTV, AND I AM THE VOICE OF A GENERATION OF YOUNG PEOPLE, AND I UNDERSTAND HOW TO MARKET TO THE, WITH THEIR “RAPS” MUSIC AND THEIR “UTUBES” AND “SELL PHONES”

SINCERELY, WHITEY P DEVONSHIRE III
- turn_self_off
  
  “generation of young people”? perhaps one that came to be 2-3 generations before that mail was written…
Anonymous

Since Google just made the V8 video codec open source I am quite sure that youtube and Google video will all be html 5 very soon. Sorry Flash, I still love you.
- Trent Hawkins
  
  Not so sure about that. According to Steve Jobs, it’s still not “good enough” to be on the i-phone.
johnphantom

Computers/Internet and the relative anonymity they give you have brought out what people really are. I bet if you were to sit the executives down, across from each other at a table, they would not be so rude.

It is an interesting time to be living. Computers and the Internet are really changing a lot of aspects of life.
- AirPillo
  
  c.f.- http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/
Trent Hawkins

What would be awesome is if Google sells You-Tube and then comes out with a competing service that runs on HTML5.

The LULZ will be epic.
- Anonymous
  
  Google already has a competing service – it’s called Google Video. They’d just need to do the HTML5 upgrade, which I’m sure they’ve at least already started that.
  
  Of course, any of that would assume that these guys could actually afford YouTube – which is highly doubtful, considering how inflated the value of these sites is.
  - bhtooefr
    
    After they bought YouTube, Google shut off the upload facility for new videos on Google Video, and turned it into a metasearch tool for various video sites.
alowishus

Clearly this conflict can only be solved in the Thunder Dome. Two execs enter, one exec leaves. Then we put a silly mask on the winner’s head and send him out into the desert on a donkey. But this time, we make sure his monkey doesn’t follow him.