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P2P Lawsuits Are Painful, Says Viacom Lawyer
Michael Fricklas, Viacom's general counsel, has recently talked to Yale Law students about P2P and its legal implications. While he declared himself as a fan of fair use without an appeal for the idea of filing lawsuits against file sharers, Fricklas is also a fan of DRM (which he thinks could be a feasible solution for online content rental and online streaming) and a supporter of the “three strikes” policy. As Arstechnica reports, Fricklas emphasized the importance of treating customers with respect as opposed to the feeling it gives you when bringing them to court which is like “terrorism.” In his speech at Yale he explained how suing end users for illegal file sharing was “expensive, and painful, and it felt like bullying.”
Continue reading »Viacom’s top lawyer: suing P2P users "felt like terrorism"
Michael Fricklas is Viacom’s general counsel, and it’s his job to oversee the company’s legal efforts, including its $1 billion lawsuit against YouTube. When people talk about Big Content, they’re talking about people like Fricklas. So it might be surprising to watch him tell a class of Yale law students this month that suing end users for online copyright infringement is “expensive, and it’s painful, and it feels like bullying.” While the recording industry was big on this approach for a while, Fricklas certainly understands the way it came across to the public when some college student went up against “very expensive lawyers and unlimited resources and it felt like terrorism.”
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