Link to a story on ars technica detailing the most polite language from e-mails released during the Youtube/Viacom copyright suit. Here are the highlights:
- Viacom quotes YouTube employee Maryrose Dunton telling an engineer to “‘forget about the email alerts stuff’ precisely because ‘I hate making it easier for these a-holes’ - referring to copyright owners - and ‘we’re just trying to cover our asses so we don’t get sued.’”
- Viacom complains that YouTube employees “sneered at rights holders as ‘copyright bastards’ and ‘a-holes.’”
- Google retorts that Viacom can’t complain about this language, and it quotes numerous Viacom execs to make its point. Sample outbursts include, “fuck you, you Google bastards,” “bastards at Google are harassing me,” and the eloquent “fuck those mother fuckers.”
- A Viacom VP even complained about the “fucking assholes” at YouTube—because the company “enforced its repeat-infringer policy concerning a Viacom marketing account that had received multiple take-down notices from Viacom’s legal department.” The lulz, they are here in spades.
- Viacom top brass wrote e-mails with more exclamation points than my niece would even consider decent. They also had what Google calls an “obsession” with buying YouTube.
- Case in point: “I WANT TO OWN YOUTUBE. I think it’s critical, and if it goes to a competitor…..!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” That was from MTV Networks head Judy McGrath.
- Viacom CEO Tom Freston wrote, “If we get UTube… I wanna run it.” McGrath responded, “You’ll have to kill me to get to it first.”
- Freston on his own mergers & acquisitions team: “No M&A team in recent history could have a poorer record than us. We are a joke… and our failed judgments and heavy handed behavior have cost us HUGELY.”
Silly new media moguls. Always with the potty mouth