Posted on 10/06/2006 9:27:55 AM PDT by HAL9000
Excerpt -
SAN FRANCISCO -(Dow Jones)- Google Inc. (GOOG) is in talks to acquire online video company YouTube Inc. for roughly $1.6 billion, according to a person familiar with the matter.The discussions are still at a sensitive stage and could well break off, this person says. Rumors of such talks were reported on the TechCrunch blog. (This report and related background material will be available on The Wall Street Journal's Web site, WSJ.com.)
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(Excerpt) Read more at easybourse.com ...
1.6 BILLION?
really?
It's like the 90's all over again. How exactly is it that YouTube makes money? When they actually have some real money, you'd think they'd be sued for all the copyright infringement.
Meanwhile, communist computer science professors and students could not be reached for comment due to their multiple involuntary orgasmic fits that started when they heard the news.
Mark Cuban got it right the other day when he said you would have to be crazy to buy YouTube.com. Their litigation potential is the biggest since Napster--The RIAA and the MPAA are eventually going to come crashing down on them. Not to mention all the libel potential still sitting out there.
It might be possible for Google to buy the name, URL and assets, but that won't necessarily stop all litigation.
If I were YouTube I would sell to the first bidder and liquidate the earnings to the shareholders ASAP. And leave the country if I were an officer or board member.
I'm continually amazed at how bad copyright infringement is on that site.
I can find PPV wrestling matches minutes or within an hour of the event ending. DVD box set material uploaded, practically every skit from Chapelle, Ali G episodes. Newscasts are lifted, even by FR members, and posted without any legal basis for doing so.
Youtube is the single worst violator of copyrights on the net today. I fully agree with Comstock1, liquidate ASAP and get the HELL out of the business. The Google people are insane going after this for $1.6 billion. Uploadable user video is going to be a kiss of death for any company. You just can't monitor it all and people will post it, repost it and mislabel it but the results will be the same; a website built significantly on a violation of intellectual rights.
Their problem is that they aren't doing the job of stopping the infringement in what many consider to be a timely fashion. Considering the volume of business they do (if you can call giving stuff away for free business), they don't have the resources to control the infringing, yet they still operate in a manner that is negligen towards copyright. They also have some liability on the libel side for some of the "hit piece" videos they have posted. This is similar to some of the problems that face MySpace.com.
OCILLA, is meant for companies like AOL or sites like Free Republic, that have the odd incident with this issue. Not for companies that face it every hour of the day. Of course, I don't know of any major cases that have been heard by the Supreme Court on this yet, so the interpretation I take on it could be off by a mile.
YouTube is deploying some technology to spot copyrighted material identified by audio fingerprinting as it is uploaded.
Their problem is that they aren't doing the job of stopping the infringement in what many consider to be a timely fashion.
There are safe harbor laws for those problems too.
Oh, please, please, please let this be true - Yahoo stockholder.
Exactly. I for one am growing ever more concerned about Google's sole proprietorship of all contemporary forms of communication.
If and when Google starts to manipulate their newsfeeds (that is, even more egregiously than they do already) to push specific political agendas and to shore up personal wealth and power, how exactly is anyone going to find out what they're up to? By Googling about it?
But remember, we can trust them because their motto is "Do no evil". Except for that whole working with the ChiComs to jail political dissidents. I think Brin's comment about that was "Oh yeah, our bad!". I guess he can sleep in that king-size bed they got him in their private 747. Page and Brin are commies.
I don't know enough about the OCILLA provisions to debate on this, but I am pretty sure a case can and will be made that this goes beyond the letter and spirit of the law. But, since they have yet to show how they expect to make a profit, this all moot.
As for deploying technology to stop infringing uploads-- more power to them, but a lot of the damage is already done. I think their goose is already cooked, the table just hasn't been set yet.
Some 19 year old nerd just got VERY rich.
Youtube WILL remove stuff if they are told it's infringement.
That could be why youtube tightened the noose around conservative themed videos this week. Google is notorious for removing conservative leaning films from their site while leaving up 9/11 science fiction, and "America is to blame for all the problems in the universe" crockumentaries.
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