Viacom's Redstone on Copyright

Posted by Matthew Heller

"If content is king, copyright is its castle," Viacom Chairman Sumner Redstone ruminated this week at the Media and Money Conference in New York. "... The assurance of copyright protection is central to ... a global media operation."

Of course, Viacom is protecting its castle by, among other things, suing Google's YouTube unit for facilitating the posting of videos by its millions of users. But in his keynote address to the conference, Redstone acknowledged that copyright protectors can go too far. "We need to make it easy for consumers to attain our content in a legal manner," he said, noting the music industry's failures to make it easy for consumers to access legal content.