Gizmodo dubbed the deal GooTube. The ginormous search company agreed to purchase the profitless video-sharing startup started by twentysomethings for $1.65 billion in stock. Today, most bystanders are flabbergasted. Wait five years, and it will probably all make sense, whatever form of sense it ends up making. That's how the internet works.
Mark Cuban, who last week said that only a "moron" would buy YouTube, today writes in a post titled "I still think Google is crazy :)" —
It will be interesting to see what happens next and what happens in the copyright world. I still think Google Lawyers will be a busy, busy bunch. I dont think you can sue Google into oblivion, but as others have mentioned, if Google gets nailed one single time for copyright violation, there are going to be more shareholder lawsuits than doans has pills to go with the pile on copyright suits that follow. Think maybe how Google discloses what they perceive the copyright risk to be in the SEC filings might be an interesting read ?
I think there will be supoenas to get the names of Youtube and Google Video users. Lots of them as those copyright owners not part of the gravy train go after both Google and their users for infringement.
It will be interesting to see how this impacts DRM. As it stands now, there is no DRM on all that video being offered from Google or YouTube. Millions of copyrighted videos that their owners spent a boatload to copyprotect that is available to everyone and everyone without it. (Personally i think DRM is a waste of money, but will all those labels and content providers ?)
Charles Cooper at CNET today writes, "OK, so Eric Schmidt is a moron." A deal analysis piece by Andrew Ross Sorkin at the New York Times is here.
BoingBoing's "band manager" John Battelle posted some thoughts about this possibility months ago, and today shares his initial reaction here:
I am mixed on this. I think it's wise to frame this as "the companies will stay separate" kind of acquisition, even if in the end that's not the intent. But this marks Google's first significant "out of brand" acquisition, the company's first true brand-management challenge. I'm not counting Blogger in here because, well, it wasn't this big. More to come…
So what do Google and YouTube have in common? Some would say: censorship.
Google was slammed by free speech advocates for complying with authorities in China to launch a filtered google.cn this January. And YouTube has been the subject of growing criticism for takedown policies which are at best erratic, and at worst, de facto censorship.
In the New York Times, Tom Zeller writes:
YouTube users can flag any video as containing pornography, mature content or graphic violence, depicting illegal acts or being racially or ethnically offensive. A video is removed – as [Michelle] Malkin's was on Sept. 28 – only if a review by the company's customer support department agrees that it is inappropriate, or that the video is on its face in violation of the site's terms of use.
But the incident raised some questions about the fine line YouTube's administrators walk when they decide to respond to users' complaints about contributions to the site – a mechanism that is fraught with the potential for vindictive shenanigans.
