As I was watching Adam Lambert sing at Nokia Theater last night, it was not surprising to see the sea of lights from all of the mobile phone display’s  from the back of the hall.  Everybody seemed to be videotaping the show.  Now with the latest phones with the 5M ~15M Pixel Camera’s, controlling what is being recorded in high-quality to share is just going to get more and more difficult.  An Artist like Adam that puts on an incredible show is so tempting to record and share with your friends from your new iPhone 4.0. So what do Content Companies do?

1) I did notice that the overall event was being shot in High-Definition Video… So release a DVD for sale?  How long before that gets uploaded and shared? Sell other merchandise instead and make all content FREE?

2) Prevent people from bringing their mobile phones into events?  It reminds me of the lost umbrella room at Tokyo station, all lined up in order of date and train for pick-up? Will clubs need to have honeycomb shelves holding 10′s of thousands of phones like a cloak room?

3) DRM? This never seemed to work.

4) Better policing by the likes of Google on highly-trafficked User-Generated sites like YouTube?  Well this did not work for Viacom….. both sides have valid points, but with all the ads wrapped around the content, these seems to be some justice is sharing that revenue with the content owners and publishers in some form.

Google has loads of technology, that if a company like Viacom can prove to Google that the content was their content, should they not be paid a share of the revenue that Google is generating from it?   I do understand the reasoning and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and the rights of the end-users to share, but for a company that is making profits via other means such as advertising, etc… surrounding the content, there must be a better mechanism to create a win-win for the original rights holders depending how the rights are set-up.

…. or I guess it all goes such that the publishing industry is just going to have to live with FREE, and all money comes from live events?  All Artists now need to become an Adam Lambert, Metallica, U2 or Lady Gaga to draw a crowd and profit in Events.  So Sell Viacom stock and Buy AEG or the local T-Shirt Merchandising company that has just gone public ? Is this the answer?

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Authored by Mark Hefflinger on June 24, 2010 – 8:02am.

San Francisco - Google (NASD: GOOG) was handed a major legal victory on Wednesday, as a federal judge granted summary judgment to the company in the $1 billion copyright infringement lawsuit filed against YouTube in 2007 by Viacom (NYSE: VIA). U.S. District Court Judge Louis L. Stanton agreed with Google’s argument that YouTube is a service provider as defined under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), and is therefore entitled to “safe harbor” — such that it cannot be held liable for copyright infringements committed by its users.

Judge Stanton noted that, while Google may have been aware of copyrighted content uploaded to its site, it has no way of knowing whether the uploads were authorized.

The judge said that the “burden is on the owner to identify infringement,” and gave his seal of approval to the current system for dealing with the issue, whereby copyright owners must notify service providers like YouTube and request that works uploaded without their permission be taken down.

“The present case shows that the D.M.C.A. notification regime works efficiently: when Viacom over a period of months accumulated some 100,000 videos and then sent a mass take-down notice on February 2, 2007, by the next business day YouTube had removed virtually all of them,” Judge Stanton wrote.

Viacom intends to appeal the ruling.

“We believe that this ruling by the lower court is fundamentally flawed and contrary to the language of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the intent of Congress, and the views of the Supreme Court as expressed in its most recent decisions,” the company said in a statement.

“We intend to seek to have these issues before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit as soon as possible. After years of delay, this decision gives us the opportunity to have the Appellate Court address these critical issues on an accelerated basis.”

“This is an important victory not just for us, but also for the billions of people around the world who use the web to communicate and share experiences with each other,” Google vide president and general counsel Kent Walker wrote on the company’s blog.

“We’re excited about this decision and look forward to renewing our focus on supporting the incredible variety of ideas and expression that billions of people post and watch on YouTube every day around the world.”