Things are heating up again over Viacom's one billion dollar lawsuit against YouTube. According to the BBC, Google's lawyers have claimed that it "threatens the way hundreds of millions of people legitimately exchange information" over the web. On the other hand, Viacom claims that they're protecting not only their copyright, but also the interests of every copyright holder out there.

My favorite expert on copyright, Mike Masnick, hits the nail on the head again, saying that the broadcast companies and Google (and pretty much everyone else) see the Internet as two different things. He says:

"Media companies still look on the internet as a content platform. That is, they think of it as a new broadcast medium. Most other folks recognize that the internet is a communications medium, and the focus should be on the ease of communication....When it comes to communication," he argues, "the idea of using copyright to restrict content gets weird in a hurry.

A similar thought came to me as I was listening to some Muxtapes. It's a beautiful way to share music, but I'm sure that many copyright owners will see it as just another way to steal and pillage. Yes, music gets shared; yes, I may have not bought all the MP3s I've listened to on Muxtape yesterday; but it sure as hell didn't feel like stealing; it felt like fun. People aren't stealing anything there, they're making compilations of their favorite music out of love.

Unfortunately for media companies, the Internet enables you to communicate in a technically sophisticated way; you can embed text, music, images and video into the communication, something what only TV, radio and the newspapers could do a couple of decades ago. Now, it can be done by everyone; is it a bad thing? No one can convince me that the Internet is just a medium for a big fat theft; if anything, I'll believe that the concept of copyright as it is now and the concept of Internet aren't compatible. Guess which one I'll discard first.