Marc Cuban was telling us back in October that Google is crazy to buy Youtube.
A lot of guys said Marc Cuban is crazy to say that.
His main point was that Google will turn into a GIANT target for all content companies who have their content pirated and put on display at Youtube.
It seems Marc is not so crazy after all as the first big claim has landed in Google’s lap. A cool billion dolllars in damages coming from Viacom.
A snippet from Viacom’s statement:
YouTube is a significant, for-profit organization that has built a lucrative business out of exploiting the devotion of fans to others’ creative works in order to enrich itself and its corporate parent Google. Their business model, which is based on building traffic and selling advertising off of unlicensed content, is clearly illegal and is in obvious conflict with copyright laws. In fact, YouTube’s strategy has been to avoid taking proactive steps to curtail the infringement on its site, thus generating significant traffic and revenues for itself while shifting the entire burden – and high cost – of monitoring YouTube onto the victims of its infringement.
In his latest post (aptly named You Go Viacom), Marc says:
…they should continue to sue the hell out of Google. Google blew it. They had no confidence in user generated content generating enough traffic to drive Youtube so they closed their eyes to the obvious. There is absolutely no value to a media company in letting users actually upload video.
copyright, google, Marc Cuban, streaming, UGC, viacom, video, youtube