(left:  old tech)

As if the DMCA weren't already the Full Employment for BigLaw Act of 2007, we have a new DMCA cause of action -- improper take down notices.

Read today's Wall Street Journal Law Blog report on the new suit against Viacom, the latest in the YouTube wars.  This one was filed by "fair use" activist groups claiming that Viacom's demands to YouTube that it remove parodies of Viacom/Comedy Central programming themselves violate the DMCA.  

I will continue to be a broken record (a broken download?) on litigation about online content.

There are an infinite number of business solutions to the business problems (opportunities) created by Web 2.0.  As always, there are only a few, and frustratingly chimeral, legal solutions.  

I'll urge anyone within shouting distance of BigMedia to read 3D Negotiation by Lax and Sebenius, whose "brainest guys in the universe" credentials go like this:

David Lax and James Sebenius . . . combine decades of high-level, practical experience negotiating in the corporate, financial, and diplomatic realms with academic expertise that helped develop much of the modern field of negotiation.

Professor Sebenius is the first Gordon Donaldson Professor at Harvard Business School and a member of the Executive Committee that oversees the activities of the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School. David Lax, described by Forbes magazine as a "new negotiation theorist" on the cutting edge of his field, served as a professor at Harvard Business School from 1981-1989.

Lax and Sebenius co-founded the Negotiation Roundtable, a working research group sponsored by Harvard Business School and the Kennedy School of Government, and Sebenius currently serves as its Director.

This isn't "win win" negotiation strategy.  This is the way to outwit the entire legal system and most of your commercial competitors.  Why?  Because a business deal creates its own legal world -- the new one that precedent couldn't possibly have predicted.

But there's no reason to rely on me.  Check out 3-D & draw your own conclusions.   

                                (right:  new tech)