What I am reading:
We’re still going through these recently released YouTube/Viacom litigation documents, and it’s becoming clear that we can’t take everything that’s being said by either party at face value (as if we didn’t know that already). We’ve come across a good example. In Viacom’s document Statement of Undisputed Facts, it presented the following seemingly damning passage that indicates that YouTube co-founder Steve Chen was advocating pirating movies (a quote that’s now appearing in quite a few news articles). But Viacom may be misrepresenting the evidence. Here’s their version:
In a July 29,2005 email about competing video websites, YouTube co-founder Steve Chen wrote to YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim, “steal it!”, and Chad Hurley responded: “hmm, steal the movies?”
Steve Chen replìed: “we have to keep in mind that we need to attract traffic. how much traffic will we get from personal videos? remember, the only reason why our traffic surged was due to a video of this type. . . . viral videos will tend to be THOSE type of videos.”
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