Philippe Dauman: The Entire D5 Interview With Kara Swisher
I will admit it–I thought Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman would go over like a lead balloon with the D5 audience, given the media giant had just sued Google–the digital arena’s biggest power of late–for $1 billion for alleged copyright violations at its YouTube subsidiary.
While not everyone in the tech space is cheering for the search giant, no one likes the litigious tactics of the old-media entertainment industry either, which have in the past–witness the music industry versus Napster–centered on deploying legions of lawyers rather than finding ways to cope with digital realities.
But I thought Dauman, who was sandwiched between YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen and Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt, made cogent arguments for his side (he is, after all, a lawyer by training, too), making the case for the need to stand up to the stealing of content online. At the same time, he also seemed ready to deal with the changes wrought by new technologies on Viacom’s business.
By way of background, D: All Things Digital, the annual tech and media conference Walt Mossberg and I host, has been sold out with a long wait list every year we have put it on.
That has meant only a few hundred people can see the interviews we do live onstage with some of the tech and media industry’s most interesting and important players.
The lineups have included Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Apple’s Steve Jobs, as well as Eric Schmidt of Google, IAC’s Barry Diller, Meg Whitman of eBay, Cisco’s John Chambers and many others.
We usually post the photos and videos of the interviews six or more months after they take place on a separate conference site. This year, our Digital Daily’s John Paczkowski liveblogged D5 and also posted video highlights from all of the sessions immediately on our newly launched site here.
Now, we are posting videos of every session of the 2007 conference here, in full, and we have made all our photo galleries, hosted by SmugMug and mostly shot by our fabulous Asa Mathat, public too. You can also access our videos via the site’s master player here.
Every day, I am going to highlight a different interview from the conference.
Today, we’re showcasing Dauman. As I said, a fine performance, helped too by a very funny intro video by Stephen Colbert of Comedy Central, made especially for D5.
Both are below:
Please see this disclosure related to me and Google (owner of YouTube).
