I don’t watch TV (probably the same with a lot of my readers). As a result, I didn’t know Apple is already airing iPhone commercials. The most interesting thing to me about the iPhone is how Apple plans on marketing it compared to how other phone companies have marketed their products.
This commercial is clearly a teaser to let consumers know the product exists. It doesn’t strike me as particularly creative when you consider it is made by Apple.
One of two things is missing from this commercial that exists in virtually every other iPod commercial:
- Close-ups
- An image that makes it seem cool
It seems Apple at this point just wants consumers who’ve never heard of the iPhone to see that commercial and ask, “Wait, what the hell was that little thing with the Nemo fish? I saw an Apple logo… But that wasn’t an iPod…”
Still, I was expecting something a little more creative for the first iPhone commercial. So far, they’ve failed, as a marketing team, to distinguish themselves from other phone commercials. But then again, distinguishing themselves is probably not a major concern at this point. 
I found this clever and funny enough to post here:
That’s right, Viacom wants a 10 digit sum from Google! They allege that YouTube has over 160,000 clips on their site belonging to Viacom. It seems Viacom is forgetting all about last month when they demanded YouTube take down 100,000 clips, which Google did. So what exactly is it that Google is being held liable for? Google is complying and taking down whatever copyrighted material gets posted. According to the law, that’s all they need to do to stay legal.
Just as ISPs aren’t held liable for letting torrent users download copyrighted material, Google has the same exception. This is the entire premise of how Google is able to scan and save the contents found on the Internet without liability.
Either way, the whole lawsuit is bogus. Had Google not complied last month, Viacom would have a case. But for all we know, the users that uploaded material could have been Viacom’s own employees. There’s no way to know, and this is exactly why the DMCA protects Google from liability.
For those of you wondering, Google is about 10 times bigger than Viacom. (Correction: Google is 5 times bigger than Viacom)