@ CTIA: Interview: Philippe Dauman, President & CEO, Viacom: The C Word

I interviewed Philippe Dauman, president and CEO of Viacom, following his CTIA keynote this morning. We talked as we walked through the convention hall (hence some of the subtle background noise) making the most of a crowded schedule during his whirlwind trip to Orlando. We talked about how important wireless is to Viacom’s future, the company’s current and future plans, and spent a few minutes on the C word — copyright. We also talked a bit about the NBCU-News Corp. JV. You can download the mp3 or listen to it online .
Some excerpts about copyright below; excerpts about wireless are on our sister site mocoNews.net.
During a video intro to the keynote, Jon Stewart joked about Viacom’s lawsuit against Google and YouTube, suggesting that the video of his comments would be on YouTube then quickly adding,” I kid! I kid! I can think of a billion reasons why no one would do that.”
Control without freezing out the users: I asked how Viacom protects its copyright without a chilling effect. Dauman: “We are making our content available to all comers. We’ve been enriching all of our sites; we’ve been building the functionality. Our viewership and user numbers are growing dramatically and we are going to continue to roll out new features. We have embeddable servers that people can take from our sites and put on their own sites — so we are all about making content available but we think we should be the ones who decide how its made available.” I pointed out that the lawsuit seems to be obscuring that message by sending attention to Google and YouTube instead of Viacom’s own sites. Dauman: “I think we’re getting that attention back every day through what we’re doing. I think the consumers will ultimately decide.”
The lawsuit: “I didn’t want to get to the point we got to with Google and YouTube. I think it;s their now outlier point of view that resulted in our having no choice — because we were the leading provider of content against our wishes on YouTube. …. Where we had a problem was when Google was taking our content, building value for itself, monetizing it for their benefit without compensation to us who have to invest a lot of money to do it.”
Google: Dauman: When they were bidding to provide search services to our sites they didn;t say to us, ‘We’ll give it to you for nothing, take it. They asked us for compensation. They zealously guard their own intellectual property; they should respect other people’s.” Dauman suggested with a smile he might consider a trade. “If they make their search engine freely available to Yahoo, Microsoft, Philippe and Co. , and say ‘go to it, you can have it’ — then I might rethink my position. I don’t see them doing that.”
Joost: “You know what I love about it — it’s not just the terms of the deal, what I love about it is the technology’s so great. Our content appears in a very rich way. We care about that. That’s important to us. … It’s not all about money. .. We like the model. We like the vision of the founders.” He also gets a kick out of the founders of Joost being the founders of Kazaa — and choosing to work with the content creators first. “You know what? It will work for them because they are going to get a better experience for their customers because we are working hand in glove with them. We understand content in a way a technology company doesn’t, they understand technology in a way we never will. … It’s a marriage — it can’t be an abduction.”

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