Reading with interest the flurry of posts about Google’s purchase of YouTube for around $1.6 billion, it seems the main worry right now is that since Google is a very rich company ($131 billion caps!), the lawsuits for copyright violations will start raining faster than you can say MPAA. Mark Cuban is particularly pessimistic about the business decision.
My take is that
Google in general, Larry and Sergey in particular, are rather smart, and would
not have taken this step, putting the entire company at risk, without first
having an agreement with the main content providers that would be likely to
sue. This would include TV networks, MPAA, RIAA, and the usual suspects. A very
obvious conclusion is that if there is money to be made placing ads on content,
or selling premium accounts the way Flickr does, why can this not be shared
with the copyright owners?
A more twisted
conclusion is that the copyright owners could be giving up on microcontroller
every individual byte in an Orwellian manner, and see the light. What is better
at promoting new content than the word-of-mouth of millions of fans?
YouTube videos
are of notoriously bad quality for the most part, in essence, making it
possible to turn the originals into streamable flash clips. Have you ever tried
to watch a video full screen? It sucks. What the clip may do is convince me to
go out and buy the DVD!
Time will see,
but I place my bets on a blanket all-you-can-eat license that will allow
YouTube to promote content, keeping both users and moguls happy. 15-second ads
at the start of each video? Maybe, but then if you pay us $19.95 a year…
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