Question of the day: How could media/movie companies increase there life terms on the Internet?
Answer: “Threaten” to sue YouTube.Viacom learnt this lesson from its dealings with Google’s $1.6 billion acquisition. Having forced YouTube to remove all its illegally posted video clips, Viacom’s traffic is dramatically up over the past month. Up 90% on Comedy Central, up 50% on MTV, up 30% on Nickelodeon. Viacom’s revenue is up too — profits quadrupling in the fourth quarter of 2006 to $480 million with Philippe Dauman, the company’s new chief executive, promising the Financial Times $500 million from digital sales in 2007.

Old and new media companies are vying for as big a slice as possible of future digital revenues. Negotiations with YouTube, for which Google paid more than $1.6bn last year, are seen as a key test owing to the video site’s dominant position.

Since Viacom’s move last month, NBC Universal and CBS have also taken a more aggressive stance towards YouTube.

The morale of this tale? Tough copyright infringement threats work. Other large media companies like Sony, Universal Music and Warner Music would also be advised to go after YouTube in the same aggressive manner as Viacom. It’s only be actively policing the Internet that content owners can transform the anarchy of the Web 2.0 Internet into a realm where content owners and consumers can both profit from lawfully posted content. Even Microsoft understands this. See, for example, Tom Rubin’s (Microsoft’s Associate General Council) attack on Google in tomorrow’s Financial Times in which he describes its copyright strategy as “cavalier” and exposes the way it is “exploiting books, music, films and television without permission.” [via Andrew Keen in ZdNet's Blog]

If more and more companies walk on Viacom’s path then the day is not far away when youtube will have “only” the legal content. And if you give a eye to that content, you will find it to be useless.

Long live movies (and there producing companies), long live humans and I would love if youtube long lives too…