I hate you Viacom.

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Viacom_old_logo1Stupidass Viacom. Go sit in the corner with the RIAA.

At first glance, that statement looks a bit incongruent. Viacom is suing a company, not 16 year-old music lovers like the RIAA. But, YouTube is a community, full of protective members looking to hold together a good thing, a place where they're comfortable and happy. And Viacom doesn't give a shit about them.

I get why they do it. The lawyers come in, blind to the free advertising, and want what YouTube already has. They look at it as if it were a series of x's and o's or 1's and 0's, and think they can offer us the same. Instead, they rush a shit product, and think sueing is a sufficient way to stuff it down our throats.

Maybe my view of what we need is a bit utopian, but I really just want to go to one place for all my video watching needs. Viacom can fuck off.

One of the great parts of Digg is the comment section. It'll always give you a quick overview of community reaction. Here's some comments:

From retroduds. "Boycott Viacom."

From the captainjs. "Man... is it just me or are companies turning into big greedy babies."

From moocat. "Viacom had all the time in the world (and still does) to make a simple video site where you can go and watch their shows with small advertisements but they chose not to. Instead they load up a page with crappy graphics, slow loading times and a bad player and then complain that they tried to do the same thing but YouTube stole all their traffic. It's a total setup of moronic proportions. This is a problem with most of american "competition", people don't fight at the product and quality level anymore, they quibble over legalese and faux marketing tactics."

From Stonewaljackson. "how can we collectively tell viacom to suck our balls?"

From Yez70. "I have parental blocked their channels on my cable box and cancelled Showtime and The Movie Channel. My Blockbuster Online membership is also being cancelled. The greedy SOBs can forget about winning me back this time.

I really liked Viacom when they had started playing nice with Google."

From DCgamer. "Here are the Viacom channels to Boycott...someone else can work out the advertisers.

  Atom Entertainment, Inc.
  BET
  College Publisher
  Comedy Central
  CMT: Country Music Television
  GameTrailers.com
  Harmonix Music Systems, Inc.
  IFILM
  LOGO
  MTV: Music Television
  MTV2
  mtvU
  MTV Networks International
  MTV Networks Online
  Neopets
  Nickelodeon
  Nick at Nite
  Noggin
The N
Spike TV
TV Land
VH1
Xfire
MTV Networks Digital Suite"

And it goes on, and on and on. Haven't we seen these mistakes before? Will these companies ever learn? Probably not as long as lawyers are running the show...