YouTube

http://www.pvrwire.com/2006/10/10/google-youtube/

You Tube, the popular video-sharing Web site has been bought out from the biggest Internet search web site Google. Founded in February by three PayPal employees, the San Mateo based service utilizes Adobe Flash technology to display video. The wide variety of site content includes moive and TV clips.

The terms came as something of a surprise, however, with Google using $1.65 billion worth of stock to make the buy, rather than dipping into its $10 billion of cash on hand. You Tube investors, which include several, venture capital firms. Also You Tube says consumers view videos over 100 million times daily through its service and upload more than 65,000 videos each day.

You Tube, it will continue to run under its own brand, maintain its own headquarters and be overseen by co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen for the time being. Google will also continue to operate Google Video. Google's decision to keep You Tube independent may help avoid upsetting loyal users of the brand.

I think 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 go with the pile on copyright suits that follow.

I think it was interesting how Google and YT both rushed to get deals done with the music labels. That tells me that they arent comfortable hiding behind the safe harbor laws. If they were, they would just be telling people to send take down notices rather than doing deals that require software to detect copyrights.