But…I dunno…do you think Big Brother Google has the same fun vibe to business as YouTube? My bet is no. I see you have Adsense. If they think you’re cooking the books or I should say “cooking the clicks” they just close your account and don’t pay you. No redress. No compensation. So you can run their ads for a year( like I have) and have them threaten to close you down for what they see as click generation fraud. I wrote back saying “I haven’t, I wouldn’t and even if I did, do you think I’d do it for the lousy $5-10 I supposedly make off you guys each month?” And, of course, I get no reply. Not even an automated one. So yeah…I fear for YouTube. The Google lawyers are probably meeting right now…along with the Advertising/Marketing jerks. I’ve a new name for YouTube if it does come undone – “YouTanked”.

But, it does make the daily comparisons with Hollywood seem pretty empty:

http://www.rabbitbites.com/misc/youtube.html

nice to finally meet you

m

My gut (and YouTube browsing experience) tell me that YouTube is not Napster, its content is much more diverse and far transcends mere copyright hijacking.

FWIW, my son is not quite 2 years old and he spends hours watching YT (monster trucks, home made pac-man videos, and other obscure clips) but he won’t spend two seconds looking at a television.

Cuban is a great guy, but sometimes he unfairly comes off as intellectually incontinent.

I will bet two of my Canadian dollars against one of Mark’s US dollar that the content will *not* be taken down after an acquisition. It just happens that I have posted another comment on a different blog about this issue which I will excerpt (with minor changes) the relevant part here.
———
In Canada, our Constitution has a “not withstanding clause” (section 33) which allows provincial (i.e. state) governments and the federal government to ignore some courts and supreme court decisions, renewable every 5 years. This is such a powerful tool that some provincial government (I won’t name names) recently tried to use it but the people screamed so loud and got so angry that the government backed down.

Why am I giving this legal example here in this YouTube post? The reason is that I think the copyright laws (like section 33) give the power to the copyright holders to demand YouTube to take down a clip. But the screams that these copyright holders will hear from fans that watch these clips will be so loud and the negative publicity and news generated will be so big that essentially disable effective use of some part of the copyright protection in YouTube space.

By the way, I am not claiming these copyright holders won’t get compensated eventually (they will and probably should) but my key point is that some of their copyright rights power (e.g. the power to remove clips that they don’t want viewers to see) are effectively gone. The bigger these copyright holders (CBS, NBC, Comedy Central), the less power they have. Because these big players have bigger audiences and are more susceptible to pressure from thousands and thousands of YouTube viewers that they want to please.

Lastly, I am not a lawyer and I did this “legal” analysis for fun. And believe it or not, half of the time, I changed my mind 2 minutes later. (smile)