aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Friday, November 09, 2007

Redstone: ‘If Content Is King, Copyright Is Its Castle’

It’s a fun quote:

He may look his age when he’s not speaking, but when Sumner Redstone, the 84-year-old chairman of Viacom and CBS, starts talking about the shifting media landscape, you forget he was born when radio was a novelty.

Making the keynote speech at Dow Jones and Nielsen’s Media and Money conference in New York on Thursday, he dug at Yahoo! (nasdaq: YHOO - news - people ), championed the accomplishments of the media properties he owns and offered a vigorous defense of copyright. “If content is king, copyright is its castle,’’ he said. “Copyright compels creativity, it furnishes the incentive to innovate. If you limit the protection of copyright, you stifle the expression of self.”

I doubt anyone reminded the old man of how few kings in castles we have left today. Or how little of the globe they rule.