The Idea Blog

So ends Joe Nocera’s column in today’s New York Times. He’s writing about the billion dollar lawsuit Viacom has filed against YouTube, and he’s right in his conclusion that neither company wants a judge to decide the fate of user-generated and -posted content on the internet.

“The problem for both sides is that copyright law is not nearly as black and white as Google and Viacom are making it out to be. It is filled with compromises and ambiguity. People have always been able to use small amounts of copyrighted material without asking permission, for instance. And though both sides insist that the law is on their side, it is impossible to know right now how a judge might ultimately rule.”

I see the suit as a negotiating ploy, a means for Viacom to gain leverage over Google, who acquired YouTube last year. But the crux of the matter is the change that’s taken place in the last two brief years, since YouTube has grown from start-up to wildly popular destination for what’s cool.

I believe there have been three phases of acceptance - or un-acceptance, as the case may be - by Viacom and virtually all of the large media companies. The first is the “these guys are violating our copyrights; get our content off of their site” response, the proud, the wronged, the powerful.

But then the second phase has more to do the knowledge or acceptance that YouTube is all about popularity, and both the compliment and the potential for greater acceptance motivates the traditional media companies to accept YouTube. After all, few question that Jon Stewart and The Daily Show, and Steven Colbert and The Colbert Report - few question that they’ve benefited from having many, many clips from their shows appear among YouTube’s more home-made content.

The third phase is where we now are in this drama. The huge success of YouTube, Google’s deep pockets and, perhaps, Google’s perceived (or real) hubris have the Viacoms wanting a piece of that. So a $1.2 billion lawsuit turns into a negotiating ploy. But one thing I always say: if you’re negotiating, you’d better know from the beginning where you want to end up, what you’re negotiating to.

On a more mundane level, we experienced a similar phenomenon this week with a client and an upcoming project. We were asked several weeks ago to assist with a series of literature items that would support the client’s own selling customers, their distribution. Over a few days the items we needed to produce expanded into a much larger scope, the photo list multiplied, and the dollars and schedule - not to mention the coordination and logistics - necessary to execute grew to gargantuan proportion. Yesterday it all came to a head as a virtually zero-based project had grown to one of more than $150,000. Within four hours it was brought down to size again, not so much through a series of compromises as much as a better definition of value and a refocused view on true objectives. It wasn’t a case of ambiguity that snapped us all back to where we started. It was scope creep. And it’s the enemy of good ideas.

All’s well again.

What Viacom and the others who snap at YouTube have to figure out is which of the three phases will serve them best. Then settle into that mode and leverage it for all it’s worth.