You're listening to Business English Pop, the business English podcast for professionals on the move.
This week's business news story is about a company that's been in the news a lot lately, and probably one that you've heard of if you like to watch videos online, which is YouTube.
You know, Jeff, this may be a good time to point out something.
A lot of English learners learn vocabulary that's in the dictionary, or vocabulary that they use every day, but they avoid learning proper names of companies that are in the news all the time.
So something to listen for in this news story are the proper nouns, many of which we use every day.
That's right.
All right.
Well, let's listen to the news article.
Viacom sues YouTube for $1 billion.
Media giant Viacom has sued Google and its online video subsidiary YouTube for $1 billion.
This is the first big lawsuit against the online video site and its parent for copyright infringement.
Experts predict more lawsuits to come.
In the lawsuit filed in the U.S.
District Court for the Southern District of New York.
Viacom, which is the owner of MTV and Comedy Central, said that almost 160000 unauthorized clips of its TV shows have been available on YouTube.
Viacom said that these clips had been viewed more than 1.5 billion times.
In addition to damages, Viacom said it wants an injunction prohibiting Google and YouTube from further copyright infringement.
Google said that it and YouTube had yet to see the lawsuit.
But Google added it felt confident that YouTube has respected the legal rights of copyright holders and believed the courts will agree.
Viacom first demanded that YouTube take down videos that were posted on the site without Viacom's consent.
Google bought YouTube for nearly $1.7 billion last year.
Viacom is the first major media firm to sue Google and YouTube for copyright infringement.
Other media companies, including GE-owned NBC Universal, CBS and Universal Music Group, have decided to partner with YouTube, which is the world's most popular online video site.
But Viacom said that it decided to sue Google and YouTube after a great deal of unproductive negotiations.
Obviously, they couldn't come to an agreement.
Viacom must have felt its back was against the wall and had to pull the trigger and file a lawsuit, said Barry Cohen, a partner in intellectual property practice with Thorpe, Reed and Armstrong.
Why don't we have a look at what the topic of the article is about?
Well, the article title is Viacom sues YouTube for $1 billion.
And who is Viacom?
Viacom is a big media company in the US that owns a lot of television channels and other media properties.
Okay, so media meaning a general name for things like TV, films, music.
Radio.
Radio.
Newspapers.
Right.
Okay, good.
And we've got that word there that we've talked about before in video vocab, which is to sue.
Well, to sue means to file or to start a lawsuit against a person or a company.
If you feel, or if your company feels, that you have been harmed by someone else and you want to go to court to get some compensation, then you can file a suit or you can sue.
Okay.
In short, we could say to sue means to take legal action.
And a subsidiary is just a smaller company owned by a larger one, the parent company.
Okay, and the whole lawsuit is about copyright infringement.
Right, which simply means that someone has used copyrighted material... Without permission.
Without permission, right.
Yeah.
And it's interesting here because there is a lot of this type of material, this type of media, available on YouTube.
The article saying that the experts predict that more lawsuits are to come.
Right.
And predict just means to say before something happens.
But predict also means to say on the basis of some data or some information that you have.
So these experts think it's likely that there are going to be more lawsuits.
They're predicting it because they expect that that's what will happen.
Sure.
All right.
And I know there's another phrase that we sometimes use for that.
We can say they are making an educated guess.
Right.
And that is specifically what predict means.
Educated guess.
The lawsuit was filed in a U.S. district court.
What is a district court?
Well, all that means is quite simply that this is filed at the national level, at the federal level, that the ruling and the court itself covers the entire country and the district is just one part of that court system.
And the subject of the lawsuit is the unauthorized clips of some of Viacom's television material that YouTube is carrying.
When we say unauthorized, it just means that Viacom didn't give its permission to use these clips.
And a clip is just a short segment or a piece of a television show or a movie.
It just comes from the sound of scissors cutting through film.
And the purpose of Viacom making this lawsuit is that they want to get an injunction against Google prohibiting or just stopping them from using this material.
That's right.
It simply means they want to prevent this from continuing to happen.
So they really want two things.
They want the court to issue an injunction that is to order Google to stop carrying this material.
And they want the court to award damages.
That is, to order Google to pay some amount of money.
$1 billion is a lot of money to Viacom.
Sure.
So I guess the cost of buying YouTube might turn out to be a little bit more expensive than Google first thought.
That's right.
So Google's response to the lawsuit was that they have not violated Viacom's rights as the copyright holder.
Okay, and the copyright holder is the person that has the ownership of this material.
That's right.
Or in this case, the company that has the ownership.
Okay.
So what Viacom is claiming is that some of this material was posted to the internet without its consent.
Now, what does that mean exactly, when we say something is posted on the Internet?
Literally, that means it was placed on the Internet for other people to see.
Right.
But, as very often in English, we can go back to the beginning of the word, which simply means it was put on a post where others could see it.
Aha, that's the original source of the meaning.
But the problem here is that Viacom didn't give its consent.
It didn't give permission to for these individuals to post or to place their television clips on Google.
That's right.
If I own a copyright, you cannot post my material without my consent.
So lawsuits, particularly a civil lawsuit like this one, can be very expensive, because the court will also make the company that loses the case pay their costs too.
Yeah,
And the lawyer's fees will be very, very expensive as well.
So usually companies don't like to file lawsuits.
They'll try to do something else first to solve a problem.
Okay, so they'll negotiate and see if they can come to an agreement afterwards.
What did Viacom say it did before filing the suit?
It said that it engaged in a lot of unproductive negotiation with Google.
Why was it unproductive?
What does that mean?
Well, it's just the opposite of productive.
So an unproductive negotiation could simply mean they did not come to an agreement.
Yeah.
And there's some very nice quotes here from the lawyer at the end of the article, using quite a bit of idiomatic expression.
And one of the terms he said that Viacom felt its back was against the wall.
That's very simple.
It just means back is against the wall and you have no other choices.
There is nowhere to go.
So you feel the pressure is very heavy.
That's right.
Yeah.
When your back is against the wall, you have to fight back.
You can't run away because there's no place to go.
Gotcha.
Okay.
And I guess that's why they felt they had to pull the trigger.
Pull the trigger means to make a decision.
When you say pull the trigger, usually it means a very serious decision, like a decision to shoot someone.
It's not something that you're going to do very lightly.
You maybe have to think about it before you do it.
Right.
It just means to come to a crucial decision point.
And once you've made that decision, you can't change your mind.
All right, well, our backs are against the wall and we've run out of time.
But before we go, let me remind you we'll release the transcript for this podcast on the website soon.
And you can go back and review your legal vocabulary in the video vocab series we did on the law last month.
Thanks for listening.
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