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October 9, 2006

GoogTube and the End of Copyright as We Know It

Google just bought YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock. Google's been badly lagging in the online video market, mostly due to their cautious approach to copyright when they first launched. This purchase immediately sends them from distant 8th to a competitive 3rd in market share. They still lag behind Yahoo and MySpace, though.

YouTube is spending $1 million+ on bandwidth expenses each month, has no real business plan to generate revenue, and is likely to get sued before long due to their perhaps overly incautious approach to copyright, so to say this is an attractive deal for them would be a massive understatement (founders are just 27 and 29).

Besides, Google's got lots of experience getting sued, they're well-prepared. News.com has a good summary of Google's various copyright battles.

At some point, Google is probably going to force innovation in copyright law—brute force via billions of dollars. No one else (Napster, for instance) had the capital to fight this kind of battle effectively, but Google does

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