The deposition request lists are out for Viacom’s $1 billion lawsuit against Google. Viacom wants the YouTube and Google founders on the stand. Google wants to depose Viacom Chairman Sumner Redstone, CEO Philippe Dauman, Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart.
Presumably Google wants to ask whether Daily Show or Colbert Report employees uploaded videos to YouTube, as they were among the site’s most popular offerings. Will swearing to tell the whole truthiness and nothing but the truthiness get the Comedy Central stars in trouble?
If it does, it’s not going to happen for a while. The actual trial may not happen until 2009, with pre-trial measures expected to conclude in December 2008.
Viacom, already suing YouTube for $1bn, spends $100k a month on a proprietary content task force, and even more time whining to the media about it. The task force’s mission is to find Viacom content on YouTube, tell YouTube about it, and wait until YouTube takes the clip down. Then Viacom slams the door to its room several times so you know it’s mad. Pretty imposing.
This is the latest ignominy in a long, degrading fall for Old Media (along with the release of the networks’ fall lineups which just came out…ouch), and has to be indicative of how little Google is actually worried about the $1bn lawsuit. Rushing to lose the online sharing ratings race, NBC Universal spends $1mm a month on its own anti-piracy efforts, and several other Old Media outlets have dedicated teams of people hired to throw proprietary content sharing hissy-fits. CBS has hired David Caruso to look for YouTube violations full time from his fictitious Miami residence.
YouTube, instead of implementing a permanent video filtering or flagging technology, has a team, called SQUAD (Safety Quality User Advocacy Department) that takes all the clip violation requests with a straight face, unable to fathom how impotent the Old Media companies are. Such technology isn’t a stretch, as MySpace already has a video fingerprinting technology in place that prevents flagged content from reappearing on the site.
Okay. Here’s a little story. Around a year ago we were doing a lot of freelance writing, growing unpersuasive facial hair and trying to figure out what to do with ourselves now that we had bailed out of the world of high yield finance. One of the things that kept us entertained during this period was a quirky little online video sharing community called YouTube.
We liked it so much we even pitched a story about it to the New York Times. To our surprise, the Times loved the idea and told us to bring them a story in two weeks. This turned out to be harder than we thought, in part because the users of the still young YouTube community were very wary of outsiders emailing them and asking questions.
One then-prominent YouTuber answered our inquiries with this:
But how can i REALLY know you’re from the new york times? you know, strangers on-line tend to lie…
Example: sometimes when they say that they are female when they are chatting … they are really male… ;)
I hope you understand where i’m coming from…
But by far our favorite response was this one:
lol NY Times, ok dude. Sure I’ll call you, then next thing I know we’re in the back seat of your car behind a McDonald’s and you claim that you ‘forgot’ the rubbers but it’s okay because you’ve ‘had a vasectomy’ and your case of scabies has ‘cleared up’.
The Wall Street Journal would’ve been a better line.
We did finally get the story, and it ran in the Times under the headline “People Who Watch People: Lost in an Online Hall of Mirrors.” It was a bright and shining moment in our fledgling freelance writing career. Not only had we landed a byline in the Times, we had written one of the first articles in a mainstream media outlet about a cutting edge technology we were sure was going to be huge. We were journalists, cutting-edge, trend-defining journalists. And we were very happy about it.
Then Google bought YouTube. And even the receptionist got rich. Suddenly writing about cutting edge technologies didn’t seem like such a bright idea.
The next time we discover the Next Big Thing we’re not pitching anyone any damn stories about it. We’re going to work for them. Even if it means we’re sorting the mail or ordering post-it notes. Because it is just too expensive not to be Shannon Hermes.
YouTube’s making millionaires in the lower ranks [MarketWatch via CrossingWallStreet]
A steamy video of Merrill Lynch banker Renato Malzoni and Brazillian supermodel Daniela Cicarelli may get YouTube shut off in Brazil.
A Brazilian court ordered the popular video sharing service YouTube, a unit of Internet search provider Google Inc., to be shut down until it removes a celebrity sex video from its site, a judicial clerk said on Thursday.
Daniela Cicarelli, a model and ex-wife of soccer great Ronaldo, sued YouTube after a video of her apparently having sex in shallow water on a beach with her boyfriend was posted to the site.
For days it was the most viewed video in Brazil.
While you no doubt deplore this as much as we do, we’re sure that for purely informational purposes you’ll want to know if the video is still available on YouTube. And, well, we can’t say for sure. But we couldn’t find it. And we definitely tried.
But you know where we did find it? Oh, that’s right. Through this link in the DealBreaker archvies.
Techcrunch takes notice of a tech start-up called Swivel. The first sentence caught our eye.
Swivel Co-founders Dmitry Dimov and Brian Mulloy start off by describing their company as “YouTube for Data.” That’s a good start for someone trying to understand it, because the site allows users to upload data - any data - and display it to other users visually.
Heh. How many start-ups do you think have begun describing themselves as “the YouTube for ______.” We’re pretty sure the answer is all of them. In fact, we might start describing ourselves as “the YouTube for Wall Street gossip.”
That said, this does sound pretty sweet:
But then the real fun begins. You and other users can then compare that data to other data sets to find possible correlation (or lack thereof). Compare gas prices to presidential approval ratings or UFO sightings to iPod sales. Track your page views against weather reports in Silicon Valley. See if something interesting occurs.
[Michael] Arrington, the force behind TechCrunch.com and a self-proclaimed YouTube fan, was dumbfounded yesterday when the company sent him a cease-and-desist letter.
YouTube’s attorneys claim he aids people in making unauthorized copies of videos posted on YouTube’s site.
The charge is ironic considering YouTube is struggling with similar issues. The company has said it complies with copyright laws and removes unauthorized clips when notified, but users continue to post clips from popular TV shows and music videos without permission.
The rise of YouTube from nowhere to being one of the most popular sites on the web is the biggest start-up story of the year. But is the rise of YouTube over? Over on the Alexa Web Discovery Machine blog, Geoffrey Mack has posted the graph above. It clearly shows that YouTube’s traffic growth flatlined—at least according to the mysterious and not necessarily accurate Alexa metrics—in October.
An agreement would allow Verizon’s customers to view some of the most avidly watched entertainment on the Internet. That could advance the long-expected convergence of video and cellphones. It could also, at least temporarily, give Verizon a marketing edge over its rivals in the wireless and cable industries, furthering the company’s efforts to expand into Internet and entertainment services.
Under the terms being discussed, customers of Verizon Wireless — Verizon’s joint venture with Vodafone Group PLC — would be able to view some YouTube videos on their cellphones through the carrier’s premium V Cast service, people familiar with the matter said. Verizon Wireless, like other cellular providers, has been adding video and data services to offset declining revenue from its calling plans.
LG15 fans are likely to be conflicted about this news. On the one hand, Verizon is using their girl for its own selfish gains. On the other hand, now we they can watch her from anywhere.
The news that Google owned YouTube took down the ubiquitous Daily Show clips and other material from Comedy Central got a lot of play over the weekend. But, as TechTraderDaily noticed, it’s not at all clear that the purge is actually working. There are hundreds of Daily Show, Colbert Report and South Park clips still available on the site. So what’s going on?
One possibility, raised in this video, is that Googtube is only deleting videos that last longer than five minutes. Is there some maximum time for stolen videos? Comedy Central owner Viacom did not return our request for comment.
The New York Times has never crossed a wound she didn’t want to rub salt in and Friendster, the poor man’s MySpace, YouTube, etc, etc, etc is no exception. (To all the fourteen year olds out there who read our site— there was a time before FaceBook, you snot-nosed punks, and we know that because we’re old!). She writes,
Roughly once a week, David L. Sze, a venture capitalist at Greylock Partners, hears from entrepreneurs who say they have the next MySpace, the copycat social networking site that has trounced Friendster. “The counter to that is, ‘Tell me why you aren’t going to be the next Friendster,’ ” Mr. Sze said. “It’s become the iconic case of failure.”
There’s also an adorable cartoon depicting “Friendster-Man” at a party drinking his own keg and gorging himself on a bowl of what appear to be pigs-in-a-blanket, while everyone else— “MySpace-Chick,” “YouTube-Dudes,” you know, the usual Friday night crew— couples up and ignores Mr. Friendster: The Wallflower at the Web Party. The whole thing is actually pretty awesome, so much so that we wish we’d come up with it ourselves, as you know we never miss a chance to kick someone when they’re down. Perhaps this silver lining in this whole thing is that the Gray Lady’s finally revealed herself as the Brenda Walsh we always knew she was. Which, we’ve got to say, is a pretty great consolation prize.
A few weeks ago bloggging tech mogul Mark Cuban wrote that anyone who bought YouTube would be immediately sued by the media companies whose copyrighted materials make-up so much of the most popular material on the video sharing website. Now he’s admitting that not only hasn’t this happened following the acquisition by Google, but it wasn’t ever likely to happen.
But not because the media companies don’t care about their copyright. And not because they just love YouTube so much they’ve decided to let the kids play with their content. It’s because they are suing smaller video sharing websites, building legal precedent favoring strong copyright enforcement and gaining leverage for negotiations with GoogTube.
If they can win some judgements saying these little sites are not protected by Safe Harbor rules, then they have all the leverage in the world to dictate licensing terms to sites that until now have not proactively enforced copyright but have instead chosen to rely on rightsholders takedown notices. If one of those sites has deep pockets, then it could turn into a payday for rightsholders, whether via lawsuit or licensing terms.
For Jawed Karim, the $100,000 or so he would have to spend on a master’s degree at Stanford was never daunting. He hit an Internet jackpot in 2002 when PayPal, which he had joined early on, was bought by eBay.
On Monday, still early in his studies for the fall term, he got lucky again. This time he may have hit the Internet equivalent of the multistate PowerBall.
Mr. Karim is the third of the three founders of the video site YouTube, which Google has agreed to buy for $1.65 billion. He was present at YouTube’s creation, contributing some crucial ideas about a Web site where users could share video. But academia had more allure than the details of turning that idea into a business.
Mr. Karim, who is 27, became visibly uncomfortable when the subject turned to money, and he would not say what he stands to make when Google’s purchase of YouTube is completed. He said only that he is one of the company’s largest individual shareholders, though he owns less of the company than his two partners, whose stakes in the company are likely to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars, according to some estimates. The deal was so enormous, he says, that his share was still plenty big.
Big enough for choice grade hookers AND mint condition Star Wars dolls, we’d imagine. Not that we’ve crunched numbers on this kind of thing. But it’s big enough, we hear.
We pointed out the other day that Google had bought YouTube for about 1% of its equity. The Big Picture takes the analysis one step further, noting that after the rise in Google’s share price following the acquisition, Google essentially picked up YouTube for free.
And if the stock keeps climbing, well, then Google picked YouTube up for less than nothing. The market is paying Google to buy YouTube.
YouTubers have begun posting videos reacting to the Google acquisition. Despite fears that getting scooped up by a big company might tarnish the YouTube’s image in the minds of its most loyal users, the overwhelming majority of these videos seem very positive. Far from crying “sell out,” most users seem happy with the Google buy—perhaps hoping that their little corner of fame on the internet will become a little bit bigger.
The video we’ve embedded above is actually quite imaginative in its vision of what GoogTube might look like.
We have to admit that sometime in 2001 we became convinced that the era where you could start an internet company and two years later sell it for hundreds of millions was over. After the first internet bubble burst we assumed that companies located on WWW street would forever be discounted by big money burned in the bubble.
But we were wrong. A smarty pants website can still make you rich, especially if it’s user driven and counts as two-point-oh. Does this make sense? Mark Cuban, at least, think Google is kind of dumb for buying YouTube.
It will be interesting to see just how google reconciles selling videos like Crazy in Love from Sony, when the same video is available as a user upload for free from youtube.
it will be interesting to see how Fox reacts to this deal Fox owns content. Neither google or YT does. Could Fox, the owner of Myspace put GooTube in a huge hole by being legally aggressive and going after every video of Stewy from Family Guy , American Idol, any of their TV shows ? The same with their movies. Beyond just Gootube, (and I mash them together with nothing but love :), Fox could make them look real bad by using supoaenas to go after individual Gootube users. Fox is also a stickler for DRM, they aint gonna like having their content floating DRM free around the net. Sure, myspace would have to clean up some of their own videos, but it would be a far easier chore than Gootube has. Now that would be a celebrity lawyer match worth watching.
Okay. The conference call just ended. There will no doubt be lots of commentary on the deal over the next few days and weeks. Here’s our quick take on the call.
Search: Sergey Brin twice emphasized the “search” potential of including video. It’s clear that Google’s founder is still very focused on Google’s core competence. That should be reassuring to Google shareholders who might be worried the company is going astray with recent product developments and acquisitions.
Social Networking: Google has been only moderately successful in social networking. Orkut never really took off. Dodgeball (which was founded by a friend of DealBreaker) is amazingly useful to its users and is popular among certain cutting-edgeurbanusers but hasn’t yet deeply penetrated our broader cultural fabric. YouTube took off in part because of its social networking potential. Google seems interested in further penetrating this internet space.
Independence: YouTube is keeping its name and will continue to be run as a separate business unit. GoogleVideo is not going away either, and plans to further integrate it with Google’s main search will continue. So YouTube users probably don’t have to worry that they are going to have to open Google user accounts anytime soon.
Advertising: The potential for integrating Google’s advertising capabilities with YouTube were downplayed on the call, treated as definitely secondary to integrating the power of Google’s search capabilities with YouTube.
Copyright: This was one of the big things that led some, like Mark Cuban, to say that only a moron would buy YouTube—so much of the most popular content on YouTube is owned by others and posted on the site in violation of the owner’s copyright. Of course, today’s deal comes only hours after YouTube announced content sharing deals with Sony BMG, Universal, and CBS (and Warner a couple of weeks ago). With Google’s muscle behind it, YouTube should now be even more attractive to producers of video content who are looking for new ways to bring their content to users over the internet, according to the GoogTubers.
Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) announced today that it has agreed to acquire YouTube, the consumer media company for people to watch and share original videos through a Web experience, for $1.65 billion in a stock-for-stock transaction. Following the acquisition, YouTube will operate independently to preserve its successful brand and passionate community.
It’s a bit unusual for Google to do this as an all-stock deal. But it makes sense here, where any cash component would probably create huge tax liabilities for YouTube’s owners. It also means that Google just picked up YouTube for about 1 % of its equity. That’s the power of a $125 billion market cap.
DealBook reports this morning that Google is in talks to acquire video sharing site YouTube for around $1.6 billion. Soon Sergey may have LonelyGirl15 all to himself.
Viacom, already suing YouTube for $1bn, spends $100k a month on a proprietary content task force, and even more time whining to the media about it. The task force’s mission is to find Viacom content on YouTube, tell YouTube about it, and wait until YouTube takes the clip down. Then Viacom slams the door to its room several times so you know it’s mad. Pretty imposing. 
Okay. Here’s a little story. Around a year ago we were doing a lot of freelance writing, growing unpersuasive facial hair and trying to figure out what to do with ourselves now that we had bailed out of the world of high yield finance. One of the things that kept us entertained during this period was a quirky little online video sharing community called YouTube. 
A steamy video of Merrill Lynch banker Renato Malzoni and Brazillian supermodel Daniela Cicarelli may get YouTube shut off in Brazil. 
Techcrunch takes notice of a tech start-up called Swivel. The first sentence caught our eye. 
