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Comment by dschobel | Hacker News Reader

At a company the size of Viacom it's not hard to imagine that one hand (marketing) was not talking to the other (legal).

If it were the legal people uploading content to plant evidence, that's another matter, but I don't think have one department out of sorts with your legal position necessarily undermines the case (tenuous as it was to begin with).

By analogy, think of a software company which has one dept. that steals its tools, does that preclude the company from defending its own IP? Morally, maybe, but I don't think you waive your legal rights by breaking the law by default.

IANAL but I've never heard such of such a principle.

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Even if one hand is not aware of the other, what they did goes far beyond innocent and accidental uploading - it sounds like a pretty systemic policy:

It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site. It deliberately “roughed up” the videos to make them look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube accounts using phony email addresses. It even sent employees to Kinko’s to upload clips from computers that couldn’t be traced to Viacom. And in an effort to promote its own shows, as a matter of company policy Viacom routinely left up clips from shows that had been uploaded to YouTube by ordinary users. Executives as high up as the president of Comedy Central and the head of MTV Networks felt “very strongly” that clips from shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report should remain on YouTube.

All of that can be explained by attempts at viral marketing. They don't want be 'outed' as the source, not to sabotage YouTube but because the viral kids won't promote BigCo.

I don't know if this will be Viacom's position, but it's one that Google should be prepared for.

It wouldn't matter. Viacom is a single legal entity. It can't both willingly participate in an act and then sue someone for allowing the act to happen.

IANAL, etc., but I believe you have it exactly right. The principle in question is the Clean Hands Doctrine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_hands).

In short, an entity can not seek an equitable remedy if they themselves have acted in bad faith.

You missed the point: it would be like a software company where one department distributed the tools on the internet and then the legal department tried to "defend" their IP by suing the people who had gotten those tools.

Come to think of it, it sounds a lot like the Monsanto case. Since they won, I guess Viacom can win here, too. Common sense is absent at these levels.

The subtle but essential difference is what the Viacom marketing team was perpetrating just a small subset of the claimed infringement.

To reiterate, I don't think the original claim has any merit, but I'm wondering whether this parallel action to the claimed grievance legally sinks their case.

Put it in front of a jury and Viacom would probably get blown out of the water, but the rhetoric makes it sound like this one action renders the whole thing legally frivolous (which I'm not convinced of).

lol, basically ... we're too big to be responsible for our actions.

brilliant!

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